| msg91443 - (view) |
Author: D Hardy (Cyborg16) |
Date: 2009-08-10 13:44 |
| Currently python evaluates infinity as equal to itself in my tests (2.6.2 and 3.0.1+ from ubuntu). I'm not entirely sure whether the behaviour of 'inf == inf' is specified by IEEE 754, but it leads to results like: >>> 1e400 inf >>> 1e400 == 1e500 True And hence unittests which use tests like if not (math.fabs(value1 - value2) <= 0.00000001 * max(math.fabs(value1),math.fabs(value2))): fail don't always fail when they should (when a value is inf). This is a specific example (and probably not the recommended way of testing values in any case), but I think "inf != inf" is generally considered the correct behaviour. (Although maybe this is left over from the PEP 42 / PEP 754 mess; I wasn't able to find the current status of implementing IEEE 754 behaviour in python.) |
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| msg91445 - (view) |
Author: Tim Peters (tim.peters) *  |
Date: 2009-08-10 14:06 |
| +inf == +inf, and -inf == -inf, are required by the 754 standard. However, +inf - +inf, and -inf - -inf, are required (by the same standard) to signal invalid operation and, if that signal is masked (as it is in Python), to return a NaN. Then NaN == x is false for any value of x (including a NaN). OTOH, +inf != -inf, +inf - -inf == +inf, and -inf - +inf == -inf. Current versions of Python implement all of that. |
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| msg91446 - (view) |
Author: Mark Dickinson (mark.dickinson) * |
Date: 2009-08-10 14:16 |
| Section 5.11 of IEEE 754-2008, paragraph 2, says: """Infinite operands of the same sign shall compare equal.""" So Python's behaviour follows the standard here. Producing 'is close to' tests is always tricky if you want to be able to deal with IEEE special values (subnormals, negative zero, infinities, NaNs). You could always write your unittest as: if not (value1 == value2 or <relative_error_test>). but this still doesn't consider NaNs, and probably doesn't do what you want for subnormals either. Closing as invalid. |
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| msg91451 - (view) |
Author: D Hardy (Cyborg16) |
Date: 2009-08-10 16:03 |
| Oh; OK, thanks for the response. Sorry, I've used +/- inf and NaN values in other languages and was under the impression inf != inf under IEEE 754. I think this requires explicitly testing for infinity then. For anyone interested, I've written a test which seems to work well. Sub-normals I don't think are an issue since it doesn't deal with the binary representation (it was never intended to be computationally efficient). It's at: http://code.google.com/p/openmalaria/source/browse/trunk/test/compareOutputsFl |
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| msg91453 - (view) |
Author: Mark Dickinson (mark.dickinson) * |
Date: 2009-08-10 16:29 |
| The only issue with subnormals is that a simple relative error test is usually inappropriate. For example, on an IEEE 754 machine 2**-1073 should almost always be considered a good approximation to 2**-1074, since the two floats are adjacent; but the relative error here is 100%! But I see that in the code you linked you have a combination of a relative error and absolute error tests, so this isn't a problem. There's something similar to your code in the Python tests: see function 'almostEqualF' in Lib/test/test_cmath.py. |
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