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NA & operations with it
From: |
Daniel Kraft |
Subject: |
NA & operations with it |
Date: |
Thu, 21 Nov 2013 14:08:15 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.1.0 |
Hi!
I just chased a bug in my Octave codes, and found that it was related to
my usage of NA to denote special cases for entries of some data
structures. In particular, I found that -NA = NaN and not NA again.
So far, so good. However, I experimented a bit further, and found that
"almost all" other (linear) operations with NA in fact return NA again:
+NA, 0 - NA, 1 * NA, Inf + NA, NaN * NA, and others
So why is just -NA not NA but NaN instead? Is this a deliberate choice,
or just an edge case no-one has thought about so far? I take it that
one should probably not rely on any of those (and I changed my code now
accordingly), but it still seems curious to me; and if there was no
actual reason for this behaviour, I would suggest to change it to make
it consistent. (I can try to provide a patch.)
Yours,
Daniel
--
http://www.domob.eu/
--
Done: Arc-Bar-Cav-Hea-Kni-Ran-Rog-Sam-Tou-Val-Wiz
To go: Mon-Pri
- NA & operations with it,
Daniel Kraft <=