On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 11:51:46PM +0000, Joel Croteau wrote: > It would be useful in many scenarios for values in collections.Counter to > be allowed to be floating point.
Can you give a concrete example? > I know that Counter nominally emulates a multiset, > which would suggest only integer values, but in a more general > sense, it could be an accumulator of either floating point or integer data. > > As near as I can tell, Collection already does support float values in both > Python 2.7 and 3.6, and the way the code is implemented, this change should > be a no-op. All that is required is to update the documentation to say > floating-point values are allowed, as it currently says only integers are > allowed. I don't think its that simple. What should the elements() method do when an element has a "count" of 2.5, say? What happens if the count is a NAN? There are operations that discard negative and zero, or positive and zero, counts. How should they treat -0.0 and NANs? I am intrigued by this suggestion, but I'm not quite sure where I would use such an accumulator, or whether a Counter is the right solution for it. Perhaps some concrete use-cases would convince me. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
