The article highlights a portability issue in standard C: there's no reliable way to check for string-to-float conversion errors (overflow/underflow) because the behavior of strtod and related functions depends on math_errhandling, which is implementation-defined. The author notes that Linux man pages also fail to document this crucial detail.
Background
The C standard's math_errhandling macro controls how math library functions report errors, but its interaction with strtod-family functions is poorly documented and varies across implementations like glibc and musl.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Oct 10, 2026 at 01:37 PM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10