29 Dec
2019
29 Dec
'19
5:41 a.m.
On Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 12:14 AM Richard Damon <Richard@damon-family.org> wrote:
But practicality beats purity, and practically, bit pattern CAN represent numbers. If you want to argue that floats are not numbers, than we can't use the statistics package, as we can't have any numbers to perform the statistics on.
I definitely DO NOT want to argue that. You DID argue that, and I'm showing the reduction ad absurdum to your claim. In particular, you proposed to disregard the IEEE-754 spec in regards to those bit patterns that make up NaN's. In contrast, I argue for practically rather than purity. In practical programming terms, a floating point number is no more and no less than something where 'isinstance(x, float)' ... i.e. including NaNs.