On Tue, 08 Feb 2022 01:12:22 -0000 "Jim J. Jewett" <jimjjewett@gmail.com> wrote:
- Should we require the presence of NaNs in order for CPython to build? - Should we require IEEE 754 floating-point for CPython-the-implementation? - Should we require IEEE 754 floating-point for Python-the-language?
I don't have strong opinions on the first two, but for the language definition, I think the most we should say is "if an implementation does not support IEEE 754 floating-point, this must be mentioned in the documentation as an implementation limit."
This is more about platform support than about implementation support. An implementation using a C "float" or "double" (or whatever the equivalent in another implementation language) will de facto support IEEE 754 on platforms that support it. Sure, a Python implementation may also choose to rewrite its own floating-point type from scratch, but that sounds unlikely. Regards Antoine.