these functions are obsolete and have no modern standard. the text in
SUSv2 is highly ambiguous, specifying that "negative means to the left
of the returned digits", which suggested to me that 0 would mean to
the right of the first digit. however, this does not agree with
historic practice, and the Linux man pages are more clear, specifying
that a negative value means "that the decimal point is to the left of
the start of the string" (in which case, 0 would mean the start of the
string, in accordance with historic practice).

these have not been heavily tested, but they should work as described
in the old standards. probably broken for non-finite values...