Mark Dickinson added the comment: > Shouldn't floating-point operations overflow to inf, not generate exceptions?
This has been discussed a few times before (I'll try to find the references). But to answer you question: actually, no. I think they *should* generate exceptions. That is, if I were to change anything here, it would be the result of the multiplication, not the result of the ** operation. IMO, numerically naive users shouldn't be exposed to infinities and NaNs; they should get exceptions for invalid inputs instead. The math and cmath modules fairly rigorously follow this idea, but as you've discovered the built-in operators aren't so consistent. Fixing it without breaking existing code and without annoying existing users is tricky, though. ---------- nosy: +mark.dickinson _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue20543> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
