Re: handling NaN

[Andy Adler]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 31-Jul-2002, Paul Kienzle <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> | Or you can use nanmax as defined in octave-forge (http://octave.sf.net),
> | which does the same thing:
> 
> I've also noticed that Matlab now removes NaN automatically in min and
> max (but apparently not yet in std, mean, etc.).  Although I would
> prefer to distinguish between missing and NaN, maybe Octave should
> ignore NaNs in min and max for compatibility?

I guess this is one of those "should octave do bug-for-bug compatibility?"
type questions.

<rant>
My personal opinion is that min or max _should_ by default
retain NaN values. NaN normally means that something significant
happened. That significant event should be retained by default.
The choice to ignore NaN should be semantically explicit,
such as by using nanfunction.
</rant>

If the octave-froge implementation of nanmax.m is too slow,
then we can always rewrite it as a *DLD function.

andy
_______________________________________
Andy Adler,                address@hidden




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