Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:11:02 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote: [clip]
Thank you for working on this, Pauli. The problem on windows may not be specific to windows: the difference really is whether the formatting is done by python or the C runtime. It just happens that on Linux and Mac OS X, the strings are the same - but it could be different on other OS. I have not looked into C99, whether this is standardized or not (the size of exponent is, but I don't know about nan and inf).
C99 appears to specify for *printf (case-insensitive) nan, +nan, -nan, nan(WHATEVER), -nan(WHATEVER) inf, infinity, +inf, +infinity, -inf, -infinity The fromfile/fromstring code now in `fix_float_format` branch recognizes all of these, independently of the platform. There are also some roundtrip tests that check that this plays along as expected with your new float formatting code.
We should also change pretty print of arrays, I think - although it is a change and may break things. Since that's how python represents the numbers, I guess we will have to change at some point.
It'd be nice to make also this behave as the rest of the float formatting. However, the current formatting of "Inf", "-Inf", "NaN" is OK as far as C99 is concerned. -- Pauli Virtanen