On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 7:42 AM, Pete Forman <pete.forman@westerngeco.com>wrote:
"Charles R Harris" <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> writes:
OK, here is what is looks like to me at the moment given that numpy requires an IEEE754 machine:
o We need a reliable value for NAN. [...]
o Max/min follow the IEEE standard. Given a choice of nan/non-nan, return non-nan. [...]
Yes, that follows 754r and C99.
o Signbit returns the value of the signbit function, but nonzero values are set to 1.
Looks okay to me.
o I am unsure of sign. Should it return signed zeros? Should it return nan for nan or return the sign of the nan? I am inclined towards returning nan.
How is sign used? If it is in x * sign(y) then it might be better to use copysign(x, y) which is well defined even with signed zeros and NaNs. It depends on whether you want special behavior when y is zero. In copysign y being 0 or +0 is considered positive, so x is returned.
So you could use this as a specification.
def sign(y): if y == 0: # True for -0 and +0 too return 0 # or perhaps return y else return copysign(1, y)
Your inclination leads to this.
def sign(y): if y == 0 or isnan(y): return y else return copysign(1, y)
I'm leaning towards the first at the moment. I would prefer the signed zero also, but that might actually break some code so probably the safe near term choice is the unsigned zero. For max/min I am going to introduce new ufuncs, fmax/fmin, which return numbers unless both arguements are nan. The current maximum/minimum functions will return nan if either arguement is a nan. How these might integrated into the max/min ndarray methods can be left to the future. Chuck