Floats and NaNs

[Dalton, Tom]

Hi,

Is there any way to detect if a float is NaN in Python 2.4?

I can pretty much understand why

float("nan") == float("nan") -> False

but I then expected there to be an isnan() function, perhaps provided by
the maths module. I understand a lot of the floating point behaviour is
implementation-dependant, but for systems where special values such as
nan, inf etc are supported, it would be nice (IMHO) for Python to
support them to some degree too. Is this possible or does it get too
bogged down with implementation specifics? A <nasty> solution I guess
would be to do something like

my_float = float("nan")
If str(my_float) == "nan":
    doSomething()

But that's awful!

Any help or reasons why the functionality isn't provided would be
gratefully received!

Cheers,

Tom
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