Re: Handling Floating Point Exception in VC++ 6.0

From:
"Doug Harrison [MVP]" <dsh@mvps.org>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.language
Date:
Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:27:18 -0600
Message-ID:
<dbfej418qri31ojm70hjpig05ptmqr966h@4ax.com>
On Wed, 3 Dec 2008 14:45:05 -0800, SONET <SONET@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:

I've been trying to handle floating point exceptions but I am having some
problems.

Basically I am able to catch the exception with the catch(...), I wrote a
class that should be thrown but it is not working.

I basically coded the following class

FloatException::FloatException( int nSubCode )
{
   subCode = nSubCode;
   _fpreset();
}

void FloatException::FloatExceptionHandler( int sig, int nSubCode )
{
   throw( new FloatException( nSubCode ) );
}

void FloatException::SetFloatExceptionHandler()
{
   // Get the current floating point control word.
   //unsigned int uWord = _controlfp( 0, 0 );

   unsigned int uWord = 0;

   // Set the exceptions we want
   uWord |= _EM_UNDERFLOW;
   uWord |= _EM_OVERFLOW;
   uWord |= _EM_ZERODIVIDE;
   uWord |= _EM_INVALID;

   _controlfp(uWord, _MCW_EM);

   uWord = _controlfp( 0, 0 );

   // Set the exception handler.
   signal( SIGFPE, (void (__cdecl*)(int))FloatExceptionHandler );
}

in the main code I do this

FloatException::SetFloatExceptionHandler();
try
{
double temp = exp(99999999);
}
catch(FloatException& e)
{
}
catch(...)
{

}

the problem is that it never hits the FloatException catch, and it never
executes the FloatExceptionHandler. it does get caught in the catch(...)
which didn't do before I wrote the code.

Is there something I am missing? Is there a better way to do floating point
exception.


Get rid of the signal call and use _set_se_translator. It looks like your
signal handler is never being called, and you're catching a Windows
structured exception in catch(...). For reasons why that is bad, see:

http://members.cox.net/doug_web/eh.htm

Note that it's no longer done under /EHs in recent versions of VC, and you
can download the Express Edition here:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/

In order to use _set_se_translator, you also have to use /EHa, which brings
back the catch(...) ability to catch SEs, including untranslated, raw SEs,
so it remains not the greatest thing in the world. Have you considered
/not/ enabling FP exceptions? There are a couple of things to consider
besides the /EHa requirement, (1) They are not raised until a subsequent
FPU instruction is attempted, which means you need to do an _fwait or
equivalent at the end of a calculation, and (2) They are cumulative, which
means if you leave FP exceptions masked (disabled), you can poll the status
word with _statusfp at the end of a calculation and detect any error that
would have manifested in an exception had exceptions been enabled. Provided
there are natural places to call _statusfp, that's what I would use.

I am running Windows XP on a Xeon. Does the processor matter?


AFAIK, no.

--
Doug Harrison
Visual C++ MVP

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