[Python-Dev] Why is nan != nan?

[Robert Kern]

On 2010-03-27 00:32 , David Cournapeau wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Raymond Hettinger
> <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 26, 2010, at 2:16 PM, Xavier Morel wrote:
>>
>> How about raising an exception instead of creating nans in the first place,
>> except maybe within specific contexts (so that the IEEE-754 minded can get
>> their nans working as they currently do)?
>>
>> -1
>> The numeric community uses NaNs as placeholders in vectorized calculations.
>
> But is this relevant to python itself ? In Numpy, we indeed do use and
> support NaN, but we have much more control on what happens compared to
> python float objects. We can control whether invalid operations raises
> an exception or not, we had isnan/isfinite for a long time, and the
> fact that nan != nan has never been a real problem AFAIK.

Nonetheless, the closer our float arrays are to Python's float type, the happier 
I will be.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco