man, 09 03 2009 kl. 08:29 +0100, skrev Alois Schlögl: > I do not understand what advantage it has to distinguish between NaN and > NA.
Then it seems you're a better programmer than I. Let's take an example from statistics. The other day I was programming an EM algorithm for estimating a mixture-of-Gaussians distribution. In all my stupidity I forgot to add a prior to my estimates of the covariance matrices (silly me). This gave me numerical problems due to overfitting, which basically meant NaN's started appearing in my code. If I had taken your approach of always ignoring NaN's, I would never have noticed this issue, and I would have used a faulty implementation without ever knowing. How could that ever be a good thing? For this very reason it is handy to distinguish between NA and NaN. They simply mean different things. Søren ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
