When is min(a, b) != min(b, a)?

[Christian Heimes]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> In many applications (e.g. process control) propogating NaN
> values are way too useful to avoid.  Avoiding NaN would make a
> lot of code far more complicated than would using them.

NaNs are very useful for experienced power users but they are very
confusing for newbies or developers without a numerical background.

It's very easy to create an inf or nan in Python:

inf = 1E+5000
ninf = -inf
nan = inf * 0.

1E5000 creates a nan because it is *much* bigger than DBL_MAX (around
1E+308). In fact it is even larger than LDBL_MAX (around 1E+4932).

Christian