Inconsistency producing constant for float "infinity"

[Alex Martelli]

Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> It has a much better chance of working from .pyc in Python 2.5.
> Michael Hudson put considerable effort into figuring out whether the
> platform uses a recognizable IEEE double storage format, and, if so,
> marshal and pickle take different paths that preserve infinities,
> NaNs, and signed zeroes.

Isn't marshal constrained to work across platforms (for a given Python
release), and pickle also constrainted to work across releases (for a
given protocol)?  I'm curious about how this still allows them to "take
different paths" (yeah, I _could_ study the sources, but I'm lazy:-)...


Alex