Unary plus operator and __pos__

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Tue Sep 28 04:40:14 EDT 2004


Gerrit wrote:

> Erik Max Francis wrote:
>
> > Unary plus is __pos__ for positive, unary minus is __neg__ for
> > negative.
> >
> > The unary plus operator, I'm sure, is a holdover from C.  Since the
> > unary plus operator is a no-op for normal numeric values, I would be
> > hesitant to use it to mean something else;
> 
> The Decimal class does:
> 
> >>> n = Decimal((0, (0, ), 'N'))
> >>> n
> Decimal("sNaN")
> >>> +n
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/decimal.py", line 863, in __pos__
>     ans = self._check_nans(context=context)
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/decimal.py", line 619, in _check_nans
>     1, self)
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/decimal.py", line 2243, in _raise_error
>     raise error, explanation
> decimal.InvalidOperation: sNaN

I don't see how that's at all a useful feature.  Besides, one add-on
module as a counterexample doesn't exactly invalidate the point, which
was a personal opinion on a design goal, anyway.

-- 
 __ Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/  \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ History is a set of lies agreed upon.
    -- Napoleon Bonaparte



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