Steven D'Aprano <steve+python@pearwood.info> added the comment:
We cannot guarantee that NAN never equal to anything, because we can create an object equal to it. For example mock.ANY
Sure. I don't expect that mock.ANY or other weird objects should obey the IEEE-754 rules. But we're talking numeric comparisons here, not arbitrary objects which may do arbitrary things in their `__eq__` method. The documentation for the math module assumes we're talking about sensible, standard numeric values that don't play strange tricks on the caller. Look at the first function documented: math.ceil(x) Return the ceiling of x, the smallest integer greater than or equal to x. If x is not a float, delegates to x.__ceil__(), which should return an Integral value. class MyWeirdFloat(float): def __ceil__(self): return -1 math.ceil(MyWeirdFloat(25.9)) # Returns -1 instead of the ceiling. Does the documentation really need to cover every imaginable weird class? I don't think so. Let's keep it simple. NANs compared unequal with all numeric values which directly or indirectly obey IEEE-754, which includes floats. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue47031> _______________________________________