[Numpy-discussion] PEP updated

[John Hunter]

>>>>> "Travis" == Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> writes:

    Travis> I've updated the PEP to conform to what I think is the
    Travis> best hybrid solution propsed and that is to implement a
    Travis> tree of PythonTypes in C whose leaves are (to the Python
    Travis> user) new rank-0 arrays.  This is more work to implement
    Travis> (but I don't think a great deal of work see below), and I
    Travis> think it will lead to the best results under our current
    Travis> constraints.

Hi Travis, 

One issue I didn't see addressed in the PEP is the handling of special
values for floating point numbers, eg inf and nan.

Will Numeric3 be able to handle something like

  >>> nan = float('nan')
  >>> inf = float('inf')
  >>> n.array([inf, nan])

or otherwise support these special values?  A common request I get in
matplotlib is to be able to handle float arrays with nan, but I've
hesitated tackling this because of a lack of consistent support for
these values in python, Numeric and numarray.  In this particular
example, Numeric 23.7 raises a traceback in the repr pipeline, and
numarray appears to work properly.

Apologies if I missed a discussion of this topic already on this list
-- searching for nan in my mail reader keeps matching Fernando, and
inf matches listinfo....

Thanks,
JDH