-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 04/02/2010 02:31 PM, DE wrote:
Scott McMurray wrote :
Actually, you *can* calculate with infinity. That's the reason for having it separate from NaN, and why it needs a sign. [...]
i can not imagine any circumstances under which this stuff would be useful can you?
I can see some very limited uses for calculations with infinities, mostly involving endpoints in a range.
i see main applications of a big int lib as convenient implementation of crypto algorithms, compression algos and building an arbitrary precision floating (or fixed) point environment floating/fixed points built on top of a big int deal with infs and all that stuff beside the big int and remaining two cases don't need infs at all so what's on *your* mind?
I'm not sure what Scott has in mind, but there's one application you haven't mentioned: simply using it as a much larger capacity integer, as the Fibonacci example in the documentation demonstrates. Something like that couldn't be calculated with the built-in integer types without a lot of work-arounds, and would likely be problematic with floating-point types as well, depending on their sizes (I haven't looked at floats and doubles in many years, so I can't comment intelligently on them).
apart from that the presence of infs complicates things -- both the conception and the implementation
Only slightly. Not enough to give me pause, if the details are already known. - -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * * -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAku2PgYACgkQp9x9jeZ9/wRKkwCgsmE3nMiP63t5vEStHuLZh1bB 1kEAoMgvhQK6oRmhONXA2ijUL44QtkV+ =q32r -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----