[Haskell-cafe] Exception for NaN

[Ketil Malde]

Casey McCann <syntaxglitch at gmail.com> writes:

> It would improve things in the sense of giving well-behaved instances
> for Eq and Ord, yes. It would not improve things in the sense that it
> would violate the IEEE floating point spec.

I'm not intimately familiar with IEEE 754, but in any case we'd be in
good company: R typically lets you select to sort NaNs as greater or
less than any other values, and sorts non-NaN values correctly also in
the presence of NaNs, I think.

At any rate, I think we already violate the spec by not having the
required "unordered" result for comparisons, and just treating every
comparison involving a NaN as "GT".  I don't think considering NaN as
e.g. less than -Inf would violate the spec *more*.

> The current situation is an awkward compromise that mostly works and
> does what you want in most cases except when you get weird silent bugs
> due to, say, minimum returning a non-minimal value, or Data.Map.lookup
> returning Nothing for a key that actually exists, or whatever else.

This sounds pretty bad, until you consider that you don't even have
proper equality, so using floating point values as keys in a Map is
already asking for trouble.  But I would like sorting to work more
consistently.

But I guess it is a matter of lipstick on a pig...

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants