[Python-Dev] fpectl: does a better implementation make sense?

[Giovanni Bajo]

Hello,

I spent my last couple of hourse reading several past threads about fpectl. If 
I'm correct

1) fpectl is scheduled for deletion in 2.6.
2) The biggest problem is that the C standard says that it's undefined to 
return from a SIGFPE handler. Thus, it's impossible to traps floating point 
exceptions and convert them to Python exceptions in a way that really works.
3) Moreover, the current implementation of PyFPE_* macros (turning on/off the 
traps + setjmp) are pretty slow, so they're off by default.

Now, I would like Python to rause exceptions (FloatingPointError) whenever a 
Inf or NaN is computed or used in calculations (which to the best of my little 
understanding of 754 basically means that I want all FPU errors to be 
detected and handled). I am not arguing that this should be the default 
behaviour, I'm just saying that I would like if there was a way to enable this 
(even if only at Python compile time, in fact).

I read that Tim Peters suggested several times to rewrite fpectl so that it 
does not use traps/signals at all, but just checks the FPU bits to see if 
there was a FPU error. Basically, the PyFPE BEGIN macro would clear the FPU 
bits, and the STOP macro would check for FPU errors and raise an appropriate 
exception if needed.

Is this suggestion still valid or people changed their mind meanwhile? Would 
such a rewrite of fpectl (or a new module with a different name) be accepted?
-- 
Giovanni Bajo