Re: [Gretl-devel] NA and nan: next steps

Allin Cottrell schrieb: > On Wed, 14 Apr 2010, Gordon Hughes wrote: > >> Can I raise a dissenting voice? Do you REALLY want to expend the >> effort to distinguishing between NA and NaN in every single procedure >> and (presumably) every function, etc? It would be even worse if you >> added +/-Inf. My reaction is that there are better ways to spend >> time in developing the program. > > I have no desire to spend a lot of time in this area. I suspect > there's an intractable problem here, which has to be resolved by > fiat. In principle, NA and NaN are different things, which is > particularly apparent in the case of evaluating 0*NA versus 0*NaN. > > The statistical programs that we've had reports on to date on this > list resolve the issue by treating NAs as if they were NaNs; I don't mean to suggest any implication for gretl's development here, but it seems to me that this statement is not correct as regards Octave and R; at least from what quick googling revealed to me, since I'm not an expert in either of those packages. Both Octave (/Matlab) and R seem to distinguish NA and NaN (and I guess even +-Inf) AFAICS.