"Avi Gross" <avigr...@verizon.net> writes: > It is about the recent discussion about the concept and word "nan" as used > in python and elsewhere. As noted, the correct spelling in python is all > lower case as in "nan" with a minor exception that creating a nan using > float(string) allows any combination of cases such as string="nAN".
Who says that the “correct spelling in python is all lower case "nan"”? The text representation of a Python ‘float’ NaN object is 'nan'. That is what the object emits as its text representation; it is not the same thing as "the correct spelling". As you note, the ‘float’ type accepts several spellings as input to create a NaN object, all of them correct spelling. Similarly, I can spell the number one thousand ‘1000.0’, ‘1.0e+3’ ‘1.000e+3’, ‘1000.00000’, and so on. Those are all correct (and, as it happens, they all result in equal ‘float’ values). The resulting object will, when I interrogate it, represent itself *by default* as ‘1000.0’; Python is not showing *the* correct spelling, just one possible correct spelling. -- \ “I wrote a song, but I can't read music so I don't know what it | `\ is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio and I | _o__) say, ‘I think I might have written that.’” —Steven Wright | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
