Strange atof and strtof behaviors

["Émeric Maschino" <emeric.maschino@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I don't know exactly when the change occurs (was it with gcc 4.1, 4.2, 4.3?), but I'm experiencing problems with the atof and strtof functions since then.

In one of my C++ projects, I'm using atof to recover data from an ASCII file to convert them into a float value. But,

string s( "0.549" );
cerr << atof( s ) << endl;    // Returns 0
cerr << atof( "0.513" ) << endl;     // Returns 0
cerr << atof( "1.117" ) << endl;    // Returns 1

I've tried to replace the calls to atof by calls to strtof. Same problem.
By contrast, a single test project with only the above lines of code gives the expected results (i.e., 0.549, 0.513 and 1.117). So this may be due to incorrect cascaded headers. I have #include <cstdlib> however.

I've also read this thread (http://www.unix.com/high-level-programming/60607-interesting-implementation-atol-atof-etc.html), but unfortunately, I don't get any compiler error or warning, so this may be irrelevant.

This is on a hp workstation zx6000 running up-to-date Debian Testing with gcc 4.3.1-2.
I can't reproduce this problem on an x86 PC, unfortunately not running Debian, but with gcc 4.3.1 too.

Any idea what's going wrong? Thank you for any input.

     Émeric