On 2005-12-16, Antoon Pardon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Your examples are still both very different from the NaN >> example. A NaN is a floating point operation that supports all >> the same operations as all other floating point operations. In >> your example an integer object of -2 does not support the same >> "operations" that a "real" GTK identifier does. They are two >> different types. > > I think the disctinction you are making is based on which level > you look at things.
Of course. I was looking at things from a Python point of view since this is c.l.p. > For you floats are something you use, you see NaN as just a > floats because the details of implementation have been > abstracted out for you. That goes without saying for anything in computer science or electronics: it's all just quantum physics whose details of implimentation have been abstracted out for me. > But look at it from the level of someone who has to implement > floating point numbers. He can't just take two floats and put > them into his general add_float algorithm. If he did that the > result of working with a NaN could result in a regular number. > So he has to test for special values like NaN is his 'code' > too. > > Of course we tend to forget this because in this case the > abstraction is usually done at the hardware level. But I don't > think that is such an important disctinction here. The distinction is in regards to readability and maintainability of _Python_ code. This is comp.lang.python. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! does your DRESSING at ROOM have enough ASPARAGUS? visi.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list