[Steven D'Aprano]
> .... I'd just like to point out that
> given the existence of float NANs, there's a case to be made for having
> separate <> and != operators with != keeping the "not equal" meaning and
> the <> operator meaning literally "less than, or greater than".
>
> py> NAN != 23
> True
> py> NAN < 23 or NAN > 23
> False
>
> (I'm not making the case for this, just pointing out that it exists...)
>
> There would be precedent too: at least one of Apple's SANE maths
> libraries back in the 1990s had a full set of NAN-aware comparison
> operators including IIRC separate "not equal" and "less than or greater
> than" comparisons.
>
> But I think this is a corner of IEEE-754 esoterica that probably doesn't
> need to be a builtin operator :-)
>
> The 754 standard's section 5.7 (Comparisons) defines 26(!) distinct
comparison predicates. I bet SANE supplied all of them - and quite
possibly nothing else in the world ever bothered (the standard _required_
only a relative few of them).
I never had the slightest interest in garbaging-up Python with syntax for
all those, so never even mentioned it in the early days.
My secret plan ;-) was that if someone agitated for it enough to sway
Guido, I'd add a
math.ieee_compare(x, y, raise=False)
function that returned one of the four bit constants IEEE_(LESS, EQUAL,
GREATER, UNORDERED} (with values 1, 2, 4, 8), and raised some spelling of
"invalid operation" iff `raise` was True and at least one of the comparands
was a NaN. That's enough to build any of the standard's predicates (and a
few more essentially useless ones, like "always true").
Then, e.g., for your <> above
def "<>"(x, y):
return ieee_compare(x, y) & (IEEE_LESS | IEEE_GREATER) != 0
and != above would add IEEE_UNORDERED to the bits checked in that.
Then it's equal easy to build oddballs like "unordered or greater" and
"only equal but raise an exception if a NaN is compared" too.
I've been quite relieved that, after all these years, nobody else seemed to
care about this either :-)
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
