28.16. fpectl
— Floating point exception control¶
Note
The fpectl
module is not built by default, and its usage is discouraged
and may be dangerous except in the hands of experts. See also the section
Limitations and other considerations on limitations for more details.
Most computers carry out floating point operations in conformance with the so-called IEEE-754 standard. On any real computer, some floating point operations produce results that cannot be expressed as a normal floating point value. For example, try
>>> import math
>>> math.exp(1000)
inf
>>> math.exp(1000) / math.exp(1000)
nan
(The example above will work on many platforms. DEC Alpha may be one exception.) “Inf” is a special, non-numeric value in IEEE-754 that stands for “infinity”, and “nan” means “not a number.” Note that, other than the non-numeric results, nothing special happened when you asked Python to carry out those calculations. That is in fact the default behaviour prescribed in the IEEE-754 standard, and if it works for you, stop reading now.
In some circumstances, it would be better to raise an exception and stop
processing at the point where the faulty operation was attempted. The
fpectl
module is for use in that situation. It provides control over
floating point units from several hardware manufacturers, allowing the user to
turn on the generation of SIGFPE
whenever any of the IEEE-754
exceptions Division by Zero, Overflow, or Invalid Operation occurs. In tandem
with a pair of wrapper macros that are inserted into the C code comprising your
python system, SIGFPE
is trapped and converted into the Python
FloatingPointError
exception.
The fpectl
module defines the following functions and may raise the given
exception:
-
fpectl.
turnon_sigfpe
()¶ Turn on the generation of
SIGFPE
, and set up an appropriate signal handler.
-
fpectl.
turnoff_sigfpe
()¶ Reset default handling of floating point exceptions.
-
exception
fpectl.
FloatingPointError
¶ After
turnon_sigfpe()
has been executed, a floating point operation that raises one of the IEEE-754 exceptions Division by Zero, Overflow, or Invalid operation will in turn raise this standard Python exception.
28.16.1. Example¶
The following example demonstrates how to start up and test operation of the
fpectl
module.
>>> import fpectl
>>> import fpetest
>>> fpectl.turnon_sigfpe()
>>> fpetest.test()
overflow PASS
FloatingPointError: Overflow
div by 0 PASS
FloatingPointError: Division by zero
[ more output from test elided ]
>>> import math
>>> math.exp(1000)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
FloatingPointError: in math_1
28.16.2. Limitations and other considerations¶
Setting up a given processor to trap IEEE-754 floating point errors currently
requires custom code on a per-architecture basis. You may have to modify
fpectl
to control your particular hardware.
Conversion of an IEEE-754 exception to a Python exception requires that the
wrapper macros PyFPE_START_PROTECT
and PyFPE_END_PROTECT
be inserted
into your code in an appropriate fashion. Python itself has been modified to
support the fpectl
module, but many other codes of interest to numerical
analysts have not.
The fpectl
module is not thread-safe.
See also
Some files in the source distribution may be interesting in learning more about how this module operates. The include file Include/pyfpe.h discusses the implementation of this module at some length. Modules/fpetestmodule.c gives several examples of use. Many additional examples can be found in Objects/floatobject.c.