Equality tests on floats: add support for math.isclose() and numpy.isclose()

Feature request

When testing the equality of two floating point numbers, it’s good practices to rely on approximations (e.g., abs(a - b) < epsilon) rather than on exact/bit-to-bit comparison.

In Python we can use math.isclose or numpy.isclose to do such tests. These functions are a bit different but both can be equally useful. Unlike the built-in math.isclose, numpy.isclose is not symmetric in a and b – it assumes b is the reference value – so that isclose(a, b) might be different from isclose(b, a).

• Floating point comparison is a common enough operation so that Numba can support it (for both math and numpy libraries).
• Moreover, all arguments of each function should be supported (relative tolerance, absolute tolerance, and equal_nan if existing) because each use case can have specific parameters.

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I could not find an issue about that when searching issues with keywords “isclose”, “float comparison”, “float equality”.

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[renatobellotti]

I’d like to have this feature as well.