The infinite loop I discovered in PHP was caused by a bug in its decimal to floating-point conversion routine, which is based on David Gay’s widely used strtod() function. strtod() has a “correction loop,” the purpose of which is to refine an initial estimate of a converted double-precision value to its correctly rounded result. This got me thinking: infinite loops notwithstanding, how many times should the loop execute? Does it depend on the accuracy of the initial estimate? I instrumented strtod() and gathered some data to help answer these questions.
The most interesting thing I discovered was this: strtod()’s correction procedure can execute at most three times. So why was it coded as an infinite loop?
Continue reading “Properties of the Correction Loop in David Gay’s strtod()”