Alastair Houghton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > AFAIK few systems have floating point traps enabled by default (in > fact, isn't that what IEEE 754 specifies?), because they often aren't > very useful.
The first two statements are true; the last isn't. They are extremely useful, not least because they are the only practical way to locate numeric errors in most 3 GL programs (including C, Fortran etc.) > And in the specific case of the Python interpreter, why > would you ever want them turned on? Surely in order to get > consistent floating point semantics, they need to be *off* and Python > needs to handle any exceptional cases itself; even if they're on, by > your argument Python must do that to avoid being terminated. Grrk. Why are you assuming that turning them off means that the result is what you expect? That isn't always so - sometimes it merely means that you get wrong answers but no indication of that. > or see if it can't turn them off using the C99 <fenv.h> APIs. That is a REALLY bad idea. You have no idea how broken that is, and what the impact it would be on Python. Regards, Nick Maclaren, University of Cambridge Computing Service, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
