+/- Inf for float8's

I'm just trying out PG7.0.2, with a view to upgrading from 6.5.3, and I've
found one quirk a little troublesome. Not sure whether I'll get any
sympathy, but I shall ask anyway :).

We find it convenient to be able to store +/- infinity for float8 values
in some database tables. With Postgres 6.5.3, we were able to get away
with this by using the values -1.79769313486232e+308 for -Inf and
1.79769313486232e+308 for Inf. This is probably not very portable, but
anyway, it worked fine for us, on both x86 Linux and SGI IRIX. One thing,
though, to get these numbers past the interface we had to put them in
quotes. It seemed as though there was one level of parsing that didn't
like these particular numbers, and one level of parsing that coped OK, and
using quotes got it past the first level.

Now, however (unfortunately for us), this inconsistency in the interface
has been "fixed", and now we can't get this past the interface, either
quoted or not. Fixing inconsistencies is, of course, in general, a good
thing, which is why I'm not confident of getting much sympathy :).

So, any suggestions as to how we can store +/- infinity as a valid float8
value in a database table?

I notice, btw, that 'NaN' is accepted as a valid float8. Is there any
particular reason why something similar for, eg '-Inf' and 'Inf' doesn't
also exist? Just discovered, there is a special number 'Infinity', which
seems to be recognised, except you can't insert it into a table because it
reports an overflow error. Getting warm, it seems, but not there yet. And
there doesn't seem to be a negative equivalent.

Tim

--
-----------------------------------------------
Tim Allen          tim@proximity.com.au
Proximity Pty Ltd  http://www.proximity.com.au/
  http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/