On Tue, 08 Jul 2014 21:02:09 +0200, Anders J. Munch wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> Oh, you've read the IEEE-754 standard, and that's what it says? "We're >> going to specify this behaviour for NANs just to annoy people" perhaps? > I was referring to the deliberate choice to enforce IEEE-754 rules in > Python. There is no force of law that requires Python to do so.
There's no force of law that requires Python to enforce reflexivity on values where reflexivity does not apply, any more than Python should enforce total order on values which aren't ordered (such as complex numbers, or sets). I'm sorry that you happened to (apparently) have a use-case where you simultaneously have to deal with NANs but not in a numeric context. But from the description of your problem, it seems to me that the obvious solution is not to deal with floats until as late as possible. That is, your current work-flow (if I have understood it correctly) is: * gather unpacked floats from some device, as ints * pack them into floats * process them in some way which requires reflexivity * (maybe) much later perform numeric calculations on them It seems to me that the trivial work-around is: * gather packed floats from some device, as ints * process them *as ints* in some way which requires reflexivity * unpack back into floats * (maybe) much later perform numeric calculations on them Although perhaps I don't understand your use-case. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
