[python] Why doesn't Python have a sign function?

In Python 2, cmp() returns an integer: there's no requirement that the result be -1, 0, or 1, so sign(x) is not the same as cmp(x,0).

In Python 3, cmp() has been removed in favor of rich comparison. For cmp(), Python 3 suggests this:

def cmp(a, b):
    return (a > b) - (a < b)

which is fine for cmp(), but again can't be used for sign() because the comparison operators need not return booleans.

To deal with this possibility, the comparison results must be coerced to booleans:

 def sign(x):
    return bool(x > 0) - bool(x < 0)

This works for any type which is totally ordered (including special values like NaN or infinities).