pickle broken: can't handle NaN or Infinity under win32

Scott David Daniels Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org
Wed Jun 22 13:58:14 EDT 2005


Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2005-06-22, Scott David Daniels <Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org> wrote:
>>>...Under Win32, the pickle module only works with a subset of
>>> floating point values.  In particular ... infinity or nan ...
>>
>>There is no completely portable way to do this.
> 
> Python deals with all sorts of problems for which there is no
> completely portable solution.  Remember: "practicality beats purity."
> 
>>Any single platform can have a solution, but (since the C
>>standards don't address how NaNs and Infs are represented)
>>there is not a good portable way to do the pickle / unpickle.
> ... 
> Fixing it is really quite trivial.  It takes less than a dozen
> lines of code.  Just catch the exception and handle it.
Since you know it is quite trivial, and I don't, why not submit a
patch resolving this issue.  Be sure to include tests for all
supported Python platforms.

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org



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