-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 04/03/2010 06:11 AM, DE wrote:
let me try to summarize arguments for infinities and other stuff
assumption: it'll be convenient if a thing, upon which some another thing would be built, provide natively some features which would be useful only in the implementation of that other thing built on top of it
this looks like some kind of an inversion or degeneralization sure the prime thing shoud provied complete set of functionality with wich any other extension can be built but since the prime thing is not generally aware of other things which could be built around it it should not provide any feature which would *possibly* be useful
In general, I agree. But if XInt is accepted into Boost, there will *definitely* be an arbitrary-precision real type built onto it. I may do it myself, if no one else steps up, but I'm fairly certain that someone will -- it's a perfect GSoC project, for example. As such, planning for it isn't really degeneralization in this particular case.
assumption: there should be signed zeros like that of ieee floating point numbers
floating point numbers is the generalization of integers but not the other way round i think you forgot that trying to make integer behavior similar to that of floating point numbers is wrong imho that's why you have no sound argument for this -- because it's not natural for ints
Exactly my thoughts. But if it does make life noticeably easier for whoever implements the real type, and doesn't cause any problems with the integer type, I'm willing to entertain the idea.
assumption: the presence of (signed) infinities would provide ultimate set of relationships of the domain entities as well as consistence of some operations' behavior
since there was no example of an application of infinities except interval arithmetics i see no reason to provide it [...]
The more I think about it, the less decided I am over it. I believe there are a few cases where it would be useful to have infinities, at least for comparisons, but I can't think of any concrete examples and no one else has provided any. And it does make for more work, both for me in writing it, and (slightly) for the computer when using it. At the moment, I'm inclined to leave it out of the library for now, at least until someone can show an application where it would be more useful than the Not-a-Number value. But there's still at least a few days for people to make their cases before I have to make a decision. And we can always revisit the idea after the 1.0 release is stable. - -- 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/ iEYEARECAAYFAku3xJcACgkQp9x9jeZ9/wQDBwCgp1aMiGzNM0/umLyMiqoaJYWC NroAn1f9wN2narrDVbKOUyuHE2l854PT =qFCs -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----