On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopol...@gmail.com> wrote: > Mark, I wonder if you could describe an algorithm off the top of your > head that relies on NaN == NaN being false. >
No, I certainly couldn't! And I often wonder if the original IEEE 754 committee, given 20/20 foresight, would have made the same decisions regarding comparisons of nans. It's certainly not one of my favourite features of IEEE 754. (Though sqrt(-0.) -> -0. ranks lower for me. Grr.) A bogus application that I've often seen mentioned is that it allows checking whether a float 'x' is a nan by doing `x == x'; but the proper way to do this is to have an 'isnan' function or method, so this isn't particularly convincing. Slightly more convincing is history: this is the way that nan comparisons behave in other languages (Fortran, C) used for numerics. If Python were to do something different then a naively translated algorithm from another language would fail. It's the behaviour that numerically-aware people expect, and I'd expect to get complaints from those people if it changed. Mark _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
