Re: [Gretl-devel] NA and nan: next steps
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; gretl
at present resolves it by treating NaNs as if they were NAs.
Neither of these resolutions is "correct". Is it worth trying to
maintain a consistent distinction between the two categories of
non-valid numbers? I don't know, though I do know it would be a
lot of work.
Allin