On Feb 10, 7:08 pm, Carl Banks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I understand your pain, but Python, like any good general-purpose > language, is a compromise. For the vast majority of programming, > division by zero is a mistake and not merely a degenerate case, so > Python decided to treat it like one.
Agreed. For 'normal' users, who haven't encountered the ideas of infinities and NaNs, floating-point numbers are essentially a computational model for the real numbers, and operations that are illegal in the reals (square root of -1, division by zero) should produce Python exceptions rather than send those users hurrying to comp.lang.python to complain about something called #IND appearing on their screens. But for numerically-aware users it would be nice if it were possible to do non-stop IEEE arithmetic with infinities and NaNs. Any suggestions about how to achieve the above-described state of affairs are welcome! Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
