OMG! Thus is fun and all, but: On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 9:11 PM Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org> wrote:
> > ... practicality beats purity. And practically, everyone in this thread understands what a float is, and what a NaN is and is not. Richard: I am honestly confused about what you think we should do. Sure, you can justify why the statistics module doesn’t currently handle NaN’s well, but that doesn’t address the question of what it should do. As far as I can tell, the only reasons for the current approach is ease of implementation and performance. Which are fine reasons, and why it was done that way in the first place. But there seems to be (mostly) a consensus that it would be good to better handle NaNs in the statistics module. I think the thing to do is decide what we want NaNs to mean: should they be interpreting as missing values or, essentially, errors. You’ve made a good case that None is the “right” thing to use for missing values — and could be used with int and other types. So yes, if the statistics module were to grow support for missing values, that could be the way to do it. Which means that NaNs should either raise an exception or return NaN as a result. Those are options that are better than the current state. Nevertheless, I think there is a practical argument for NaN-as-missing value. Granted, it is widely used in other systems because it can be stored in a float data type, and that is not required for Python. But it is widely used, so is familiar to many. But if we don’t go that route, it would be good to provide NaN-filtering routines in the statistics module — as the related thread shows, NaN detection is not trivial. Frankly, I’m also confused as to why folks seem to think this is an issue to be addressed in the sort() functions — those are way too general and low level to be expected to solve this. And it would be a much heavier lift to make a change that central to Python anyway. -CHB -- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython
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