Message135059
Alexander, I urge you to take a good deal of care with this tracker item and not make any changes lightly. Take a look at how other languages have dealt with the issue.
Also, consider that "unorderable" may not be the right answer at all. The most common use of NaNs is as a placeholder for missing data. Perhaps putting them at the end of a sort is the right thing to do (c.f. was databases do with NULL values).
The other major use for NaNs is a way to let an invalid intermediate result flow through the remainder of a calculation (much as @NA does in MS Excel). The spirit of that use case would suggest that raising an exception during a sort is the wrong thing to do.
Another consideration is that it would be unusual (and likely unexpected) to have a type be orderable or not depending on a particular value. Users ask themselves whether floats are orderable, not whether some values of floats are orderable.
I strongly oppose this patch in its current form and think it is likely to break existing code that expects NaNs to be quiet. |
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Date |
User |
Action |
Args |
2011-05-03 18:58:04 | rhettinger | set | recipients:
+ rhettinger, mark.dickinson, belopolsky, alex, daniel.urban |
2011-05-03 18:58:04 | rhettinger | set | messageid: <1304449084.88.0.0608562540322.issue11949@psf.upfronthosting.co.za> |
2011-05-03 18:58:03 | rhettinger | link | issue11949 messages |
2011-05-03 18:58:03 | rhettinger | create | |
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