On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 11:51:46PM +0000, Joel Croteau wrote:
It would be useful in many scenarios for values in collections.Counter to be allowed to be floating point.
Can you give a concrete example?
I know that Counter nominally emulates a multiset, which would suggest only integer values, but in a more general sense, it could be an accumulator of either floating point or integer data.
As near as I can tell, Collection already does support float values in both Python 2.7 and 3.6, and the way the code is implemented, this change should be a no-op. All that is required is to update the documentation to say floating-point values are allowed, as it currently says only integers are allowed.
I don't think its that simple. What should the elements() method do when an element has a "count" of 2.5, say? What happens if the count is a NAN? There are operations that discard negative and zero, or positive and zero, counts. How should they treat -0.0 and NANs? I am intrigued by this suggestion, but I'm not quite sure where I would use such an accumulator, or whether a Counter is the right solution for it. Perhaps some concrete use-cases would convince me. -- Steve