Re: [Python-ideas] NAN handling in the statistics module

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 11:06 PM Steven D'Aprano steve@pearwood.info wrote:

I'm not wedded to the idea that the default ought to be the current behaviour. If there is a strong argument for one of the others, I'm listening.

"Errors should never pass silently"? Silently returning nonsensical results is hard to defend as a default behavior IMO :-)

How would you answer those who say that the right behaviour is not to propogate unwanted NANs, but to fail fast and raise an exception?

Both seem defensible a priori, but every other mathematical operation in Python propagates NaNs instead of raising an exception. Is there something unusual about median that would justify giving it unusual behavior?

-n