On 2005-06-22, Scott David Daniels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I'm working on it. I should have said it's trivial if you have >> access to the platforms to be supported. I've tested a fix >> that supports pickle streams generated under Win32 and glibc. >> That's using the "native" string representation of a NaN or >> Inf. > Several issues:
> (1) The number of distinct NaNs varies among platforms. According to the IEEE standard, there are exactly two: signalling and quiet, and on platforms that don't impliment floating point exceptions (probably in excess of 99.9% of python installations), the difference between the two is moot. > There are quiet and signaling NaNs, negative 0, Negative 0 isn't a NaN, it's just negative 0. > the NaN that Windows VC++ calls "Indeterminate," and so > on. That's just Microsoft's way of spelling "signalling NaN." > (2) There is no standard-conforming way to create these values. What standard are you looking at? My copy of the IEEE 754 standard is pretty clear. > (3) There is no standard-conforming way to detect these > values. The bit patterns are defined by the IEEE 754 standard. If there are Python-hosting platoforms that don't use IEEE 754 as the floating point representation, then that can be dealt with. Python has _tons_ of platform-specific code in it. Why all of a sudden is it taboo for Python to impliment something that's not universally portable and defined in a standard? Where's the standard defining Python? -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! ... A housewife at is wearing a polypyrene visi.com jumpsuit!! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list