On 2007-05-08, Greg Corradini <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm running descriptive stats on mileages from a database > (float numbers, about a million records). My sum returns > 1.#QNAN, which I understand from searching this forum is an > error.
Not necessarily. You've ended up with a floating point "not a number" value (AKA a NaN). That might or might not be an error. Whether it's an error not not depends on your input data and your algorithm. > While I'm looking for help in solving this problem, I'm more > interested in a general explanation about the cause of this > problem. If you're asking how you end up with a NaN, there are several ways to generate a NaN: 0/0 Inf*0 Inf/Inf Inf-Inf Almost any operation on a NaN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/coding/ieeefloat.html -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Spreading peanut at butter reminds me of visi.com opera!! I wonder why? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
