Erlang (and by extension Elixir) supports floating-point numbers.
Some possible Floats:
Erlang supports NaN (nan. in Erlang) (I am however yet to discover a method that outputs nan itself).
However, Erlang does not have support for Infinity. While common standards like IEEE-754 state that one should return Infinity when doing things like 1.0/0.0, instead, Erlang throws a bad arithmetic error.
The same happens when attempting to make floats that are 'too large' like 1.0e400.
There's probably some (historical?) reason behind this.
Erlang does all sorts of "bad" things with floats (not quite IEEE 754 binary64): conflates -0 and +0 to 0, doesn't do +-SNaNs, +-QNaNs, +-denormals or +-infinity.
For actual, scientific computations with precise error handling, it's probably worth dropping into another language either with a Port, doing some RPC or writing C/C++ NIF.
Reference: http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/coding/ieeefloat.html
Update: I wrote a trivial ieee754 module here which classifies binary64 floats and converts those that Erlang supports.
Looking in ./erts/emulator/sys/unix/sys_float.c
it appears to me that Erlang is using the underlying strtod implementation to convert to "standard" C floats.
On most unix systems, floating point was not implemented to that standard
at the time Erlang was created, but values that would generate Infinity instead generate fpe signal errors.
