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

[David Cournapeau]

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 9:28 AM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Me too, but I don't see how to reconcile this with the intent of
simplifying nan handling because they are not intuitive, which seems
to be the goal of this discussion.

David