Torgil Svensson wrote: > On 6/22/07, Robert Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Making float types parse/emit standard string >> representations for NaNs and infs could probably go in if you were to >> provide an >> implementation and work out all of the bugs and cross-platform issues. > > The float types already emit string-representation of nan's and inf's > but doesn't know how to parse them back. This parsing step should be > trivial to implement. > > I cannot see any cross-platform issues with this.
Well, the string representation that is (currently) emitted is not cross-platform, so you will have to add that back to the list. > If the floats aren't > binary compatible across platforms we'll have to face these issues > regardless of the string representation (I think they are, except for > endianess). NaNs and infs are IEEE-754 concepts. Python does run on non-IEEE-754 platforms, and I don't think that python-dev will want to entirely exclude them. You will have to do *something* about those platforms. Possibly, they just won't support NaNs and infs at all, but you'd have to make sure that the bit pattern that is a NaN on IEEE-754 systems won't be misinterpreted as a NaN on the non-IEEE-754 systems. > If cross-platform issues includes string representation from other > sources than python 3.0, things get trickier. I think that python > should handle it's own string representation, others could always be > handled with sub-classing. At a minimum "float(str(nan))==nan" should > evaluate as True. Then go for it. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
