[Python-Dev] VAX NaN evaluations (original) (raw)

John Klos john at ziaspace.com
Tue Nov 5 10:20:07 CET 2013

I'm sorry to hear that - you might have been wasting your time (but then, perhaps not).

We decided a while ago that the regular Python releases will not support VAX/VMS any longer. So any code you write has zero chance of being integrated into Python (the same holds for m68k code, BTW). That said, you are free to maintain your own branch of Python. In that branch, you can make whatever changes you consider necessary, but you will be on your own.

Oh, it's definitely not wasting time. I seriously doubt I'd be asking Python people to maintain patches upstream, because I seriously doubt we'd have any to maintain - this is for NetBSD/VAX, not VMS. Running NetBSD on VAX points out many instances where programmers make assumptions, so everyone is helped when we address those assumptions.

From Steven D'Aprano: Just to be clear, rather than dump core (which you suggested in a later email), if you cannot support NANs on VAXen, you should modify float to raise a ValueError exception. Pure Python code like float('nan') should never dump core, it should raise:

ValueError: could not convert string to float: 'nan'

What Steven recommends makes a lot of sense, and if the Python folks don't think it's worth adding a few lines to make NaN assignments optionally raise an exception, we can keep the patches in NetBSD's pkgsrc.

So the next time I have a little time, I'll look through the code and see if I can't find where that would be. And while I'm at it, I'll try to learn a little Python ;)

Thanks, John

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