[Python-Dev] Mixing float and Decimal -- thread reboot

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Dickinson writes:

 > On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:36 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
 > > Steven D'Aprano writes:

 > >  > I suspect that's a feature, not a bug.
 > 
 > Right:  distinct nans (i.e., those with different id()) are treated as
 > distinct set elements or dict keys.
 > 
 > > I don't see how it can be so.  Aren't all of those entries garbage?
 > > To compute a histogram of results for computations on a series of
 > > cases would you not have to test each result for NaN-hood, then hash
 > > on a proxy such as the string "Nan"?
 > 
 > So what alternative behaviour would you suggest, and how would you
 > implement it?

I don't have an alternative behavior to suggest.  I'm not suggesting
that it's a bug, I'm suggesting that it's a wart: useless, ugly, and
in some presumably rare/buggy cases, it could lead to nasty behavior.
The example I have in mind is computing a histogram of function values
for a very large sample of inputs.  (This is a pathological example,
of course: things where NaNs are representable generally won't be used
directly as keys in a dictionary used to represent a histogram.
Rather, they would be mapped to a representative value as the key.)
If there are a lot of NaN's, the dictionary could get unexpectedly
large.

That's not Python's fault, of course:

 > Meanwhile IEEE 754 requires that nans compare unequal to
 > themselves, breaking reflexivity.  So there have to be some
 > compromises somewhere.

Indeed.  IEEE 754 compatibility *is* a feature.

 > One alternative would be to prohibit putting nans into sets and
 > dicts by making them unhashable; I'm not sure what that would gain,
 > though.

I would find that more intuitive.  While NaNs aren't mutable, they're
similar to mutable values in that their value is not deterministic in
a certain sense.

OTOH, since the only example I can think of where I would personally
want to check whether a NaN is in a container is pathological, my
intuition is hardly reliable.