Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettin...@gmail.com> added the comment: Alexander, I urge you to take a good deal of care with this tracker item and not make any changes lightly. Take a look at how other languages have dealt with the issue.
Also, consider that "unorderable" may not be the right answer at all. The most common use of NaNs is as a placeholder for missing data. Perhaps putting them at the end of a sort is the right thing to do (c.f. was databases do with NULL values). The other major use for NaNs is a way to let an invalid intermediate result flow through the remainder of a calculation (much as @NA does in MS Excel). The spirit of that use case would suggest that raising an exception during a sort is the wrong thing to do. Another consideration is that it would be unusual (and likely unexpected) to have a type be orderable or not depending on a particular value. Users ask themselves whether floats are orderable, not whether some values of floats are orderable. I strongly oppose this patch in its current form and think it is likely to break existing code that expects NaNs to be quiet. ---------- nosy: +rhettinger _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue11949> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
