Re: NaN and missing values

[Olli Saarela]

What a delightful surprise it was, when returning to the office after a
short absence, to discover this thread has turned into a constructive
conversation. Thank you all, and please forgive me my primitive defense
reaction last week.

My pennies worth: Like quite a few other people, I also use NaN values
to indicate missing data. Having seen a few applications with such
approach, I don't believe there is any simple application independent
way that missing data should be handled. It seems to me that very little
that is not application specific can be added to the IEEE NaN handling.
I am a bit wary about cluttering the C++ libraries with application
dependent NaN operations. The nanmin, nanmax, ... functions mentioned in
the discussion (and their possible speedup with the min(x,"ignore_nan"))
seem generic enough.

Best regards,
  Olli
--
Olli Saarela                       KCL Development Oy
address@hidden                tel. +358-9-4371538 (office)
Tekniikantie 2, Espoo-Otaniemi     fax. +358-9-464305
P.O. Box 70, FIN-02151 Espoo, Finland



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