> ---- conclusions ------------------------------- try testing on a large number of candidates that are all (or mostly) positive or all (or mostly) negative and you'll see performance numbers that are substantially different than the ones you report:
candidates = range(1000) In general the function sign_1() is expected to be the fastest because in most cases will detect the sign with the fewest operations, it only visits the rest of the comparison when it hits the corner cases. Only if you have lots of +/-0.0 cases will it be slower than the rest, due to having to call an expensive operation. i. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
