where in Nan defined

[Steven D'Aprano]

Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 1:50 AM, Jussi Piitulainen
> <jpiitula at ling.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>>    >>> 0*1e400
>>    nan
> 
> Nice, that's shorter than mine.

o_O

Is that really the sort of thing you should be revealing here?

Oh wait, you're talking about code...

I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that 0*1e400 may not be quite as
portable as your inf-inf. By the rules of IEEE-754 arithmetic, inf-inf has
to return a NAN, but if your floats have sufficient precision available to
represent 1e400, 0*1e400 might return 0.

The fallback rule I use when float('nan') fails is

    INF = 1e3000  # Hopefully, this should overflow to INF.
    NAN = INF-INF  # And this hopefully will give a NaN.



-- 
Steven