Re: Moving VAX into 21 century :-)

[Paul Koning <paulkoning%comcast.net@localhost>]

> On Aug 27, 2019, at 6:10 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt%update.uu.se@localhost> wrote:
> 
>> ...
> 
> Python have all kind of test suites that really expect various INF and NaN to behave like IEEE expects. I wonder if this one will be solved by faking it.
> And if you just accept that it won't pass the test suites, I think it can already be made to work (if we just get a working C compiler back).

The cleaner answer would be to do what Python does in a large number of other places, which is to make some of the methods be available or not depending on the environment.  Currently the math.xyz methods that related to INF and NaN are not documented that way, but it seems plausible enough that they could be.  And if so, the test suite would simply deal with that as it deals with any other platform dependency.

So I'd call this a Python defect.  The one remaining question is whether the Python community would accept a patch for it.

	paul