Top and Bottom Values [PEP: 326]

[George Sakkis]

Antoon Pardon wrote:

> What bothers me a bit about the rejection of PEP 326 is that one of the
> reasons stated is:
>
>   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-January/042306.html
>
>   - it is easily implemented when you really need it
>
> Well I thought it would simplify some things for me, so I tried an
> implementation and then found that some of the things that I would
> want to do with it wont work. So the "is easily implemented" bit
> seems not to be correct.

IIRC, the PEP proposed the Smallest and Largest singletons with the
sole purpose of being used in comparisons. No numeric behavior was
implied, i.e. Smallest and Largest are not negative and positive
infinity in the math sense of the word. So I guess the "easily
implemented" refers to this case alone.

George