On Feb 10, 7:07 pm, Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2008-02-10, Christian Heimes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>>> from somemodule import ieee754 > >>>> with ieee754: > > ... r = a/0 > > ... print r > > inf > > That would be great.
Seriously, in some of my crazier moments I've considered trying to write a PEP on this, so I'm very interested in figuring out exactly what it is that people want. The devil's in the details, but the basic ideas would be: (1) aim for consistent behaviour across platforms in preference to exposing differences between platforms (2) make default arithmetic raise Python exceptions in preference to returning infs and nans. Essentially, ValueError would be raised anywhere that IEEE 754(r) specifies raising the divide-by-zero or invalid signals, and OverflowError would be raised anywhere that IEEE 754(r) specifies raising the overflow signal. The underflow and inexact signals would be ignored. (3) have a thread-local floating-point environment available from Python to make it possible to turn nonstop mode on or off, with the default being off. Possibly make it possible to trap individual flags. Any thoughts on the general directions here? It's far too late to think about this for Python 2.6 or 3.0, but 3.1 might be a possibility. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list