> I don't know. On I was just asking. On unixoid systems I sort of assume > you could add tests to the configure script to detect what worked. If > converting the strings works you're done. If not, maybe Robert Kern's numpy > code could be run in the configure script to generate constants for NaN and > Inf that could be used in floatmodule.c. Windows would probably have to be > hard-coded, but except for 32-bit and 64-bit differences it should be the > same all over, yes?
I cannot imagine what the constants would look like. For +/-inf, it might be possible to write down an expression that causes an overflow. For NaN, I cannot think of such an expression (also, there are many possible values that are all not-a-number - which of them should be denoted by float("NaN")?). Even if you determine at configure time whether or not the C library already supports strtod("inf") and even if you then special-case Windows - what do you do with platforms where neither approach works? In short, I cannot think of a way to do that portably on all platforms in C. If there was such a way, it probably would have been implemented long ago. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list