FLOATING NULL?

[Blair P. Houghton]

In article <1991May28.153655.24199 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <13223 at uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> karl at wiliki.UUCP (Karl Ihrig) writes:
>>...blank spots in my real world data.  I am totally baffled.  How do I
>>mark the float element of the array as null, blank, or not
>>available?
>
>There is no portable way except allocating a separate flag for each of
>your float values.  C does not guarantee the existence of any "blank" value

Another idea is to keep the 2-d array of floating point
numbers, and in the spreadsheet cells keep pointers to the
members of the array.  Then you can use a null pointer to
indicate a blank cell.

This roughly doubles the memory usage of that array, and
complicates a considerable amount of your floating-point
computations with pointer references, but it does provide
the important feature you desire.

				--Blair
				  "There's got to be a way
				   to get back homeward..."
				   -Lennon & McCartney