One of the strengths of the IEEE float, (to set against its many weaknesses), is the presence of the magic value NaN. Not a Number, or NaA, is especially useful in that it is a valid value in any mathematical operation, (always returning NaN), or comparison, (always returning False). In functional programming this is especially useful as it allows the chain to complete after an error while retaining the fact that an error occurred, (as we got NaN).
In languages such as C integers can only be used to represent a limited range of values in integers and a less limited range of values, (but still limited), with a limited accuracy. However, one of Pythons strengths is that its integers can represent any whole number value, (up to the maximum available memory and in exchange for slow performance when numbers get huge). This is accomplished by Python Integers being objects rather than a fixed number of bytes. I think that it should be relatively simple to extend the Python integer class to have a NaN flag, possibly by having a bit length of 0, and have it follow the same rules for the handling of floating point NaN, i.e. any mathematical operation on an iNaN returns an iNaN and any comparison with one returns False. One specific use case that springs to mind would be for Libraries such as Pandas to return iNaN for entries that are not numbers in a column that it has been told to treat as integers. We would possibly need a flag to set this behaviour, rather than raising an Exception, or at the very least automatically (or provide a method to) set LHS integers to iNaN on such an exception. I thought that I would throw this out to Python Ideas for some discussion of whether such a feature is: a) Desirable? b) Possible, (I am sure that it could be done)? c) Likely to get me kicked off of the list? -- Steve (Gadget) Barnes Any opinions in this message are my personal opinions and do not reflect those of my employer. --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
