Re: [Haskell-cafe] Exception for NaN

On Sat, 14 May 2011 06:14:31 -0700, Ketil Malde wrote:

Daniel Fischer writes:

...

Not having Eq and Ord instances for Double and Float would be extremely inconvenient (too inconvenient to seriously consider, I think), so one can a) do what's done now b) make NaNs an error c) come up with a brilliant solution.

Maybe not terribly brilliant, but wouldn't it improve things slightly if NaN was considered less or greater than any other value (possibly excluding infinities)?

-k

It has a certain aesthetic appeal, but another concern of this approach would be non-termination. This is perhaps less of a concern for functional methodologies, but still a danger for algorithms that assume total ordering. -- -KQ