On 12/28/19 8:40 PM, David Mertz wrote:
This is sophistry. NaN is an instance of the abstract type
numbers.Number and the concrete type float. IEEE-754 defines NaN as
collection of required values in any floating point type.
I know the acronym suggests otherwise in a too-cute way, but NaN is
archetypically a number in a computer science sense (but not in a pure
math way, of course).
Likewise, YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a markup language. And
GNU (GNU's Not Unix) is a Unix system.
NaN may be an instance of the abstract type Number, but is isn't a
mathematical number. It exists as that because it is a value of the type
float (and then adopted in some others). It is a floating point value
because in the Field of the Real Numbers, and the approximation made in
the floating point types, not all operations are closed under the full
domain of values, and because a computer hardware system needs to
produce SOME answer, the standard defined a value (or actually a set of
values) to represent these Non-Number answers. Yes, NaN really is a
value that represents Not A Number.
Note, that the statistics module doesn't say it works with Numbers, but
with numeric data.
Also, YAML is NOT a markup language, but a data serialization format. It
in fact started as Yet Another Markup Language, but when they realized
that what they were designing wasn't really a mark up language, but a
data based (not document formatting) language they change it to be more
descriptive.
Also GNU isn't Unix, as Unix is a trademarked name for a specific set of
operating systems. GNU produced Linux, which is a mostly work-alike
operating system. Its sort of like saying Scotties isn't a Kleenex (Both
brands of facial tissues).
--
Richard Damon
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