On Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 12:14 AM Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org>
wrote:

> But practicality beats purity, and practically, bit pattern CAN
> represent numbers. If you want to argue that floats are not numbers, than
> we can't use the statistics package, as we can't have any numbers to
> perform the statistics on.
>

I definitely DO NOT want to argue that. You DID argue that, and I'm showing
the reduction ad absurdum to your claim.

In particular, you proposed to disregard the IEEE-754 spec in regards to
those bit patterns that make up NaN's. In contrast, I argue for practically
rather than purity.

In practical programming terms, a floating point number is no more and no
less than something where 'isinstance(x, float)' ... i.e. including NaNs.
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