--- Andrew Straw <strawman@astraw.com> wrote:

...

This behavior is explained by Tim Peters:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/16dbf848c050405a

...

I feared it was something like that. (No platform independent way to represent special values like nan, inf, and so on.) So I think if we're going to require an encoding character such as '<' or '>' we should also include one that means native which CAN handle these special values... And document why it's needed and why it may get one into trouble.

The data is either big endian or little endian (or possibly a single byte in which case it doesn't matter). Whether or not the (hardware, operating system, C runtime library, C compiler, or Python implementation) can handle NaNs or Infs is not a property of the data. What does an additional code or two get you? Let's say we used ']' for big endian native, and '[' for little endian native? Does that just indicate the possible presence of NaNs for Infs in the data? Adding those codes doesn't have any affect on whether or not libraries can deal with them. I guess I'm not understanding something. Cheers, -Scott