On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 at 06:54, David Mertz <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks so much Ben for documenting all these examples. I've been frustrated > by the inconsistencies, but hasn't realized all of those you note. > > It would be a breaking change, but I'd really vastly prefer if almost all of > those OverflowErrors and others were simply infinities. That's much closer to > the spirit of IEEE-754. > > The tricky case is 1./0. Division is such an ordinary operation, and it's so > easy to get zero in a variable accidentally. That one still feels like an > exception, but yes 1/1e-323 vs. 1/1e-324 would them remain a sore spot.
We need to remember that a significant number of Python users don't have any idea what IEE-754 is, and have never heard of a NaN (and possibly even of infinity as a number). Those people are *far* better served by being told "you made a mistake" in the form of an exception, rather than via a weird numeric value that doesn't work how they expect and doesn't even look like a number when they print it. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/M7AXLKSSKDOUC6AUIEGJC2HISJFHMV5H/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
