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 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 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 considering intervals if we use floating point numbers we can define an interval as (-inf; +inf) here a finite number of distinct values fill the interval when we use ordinary ints we define it possibly as (-MAX_INT; MAX_INT) or even [-MAX_INT; MAX_INT] (including endpoints) notice lack of infinities here here as well we have finite number of values filling the interval, namely 2^(sizeof(int)*8) so to be consistent we should define an interval for xint as (-SaneBigValue; SaneBigValue) only this way the interval would be useful (considering finite memory, time etc.) the provision of infinities would render such interval unuseful since there would be a strong possibility of popping of an unrepresentable number during computations (unrepresentable due to memory limitations) moreover in that situation it would be inexact -> no need to use the lib at all, better use floating point numbers so i still don't see any sane application of infinities in a integer domain and hence the need of infinities at all -- Pavel P.S. if you notice a grammar mistake or weird phrasing in my message please point it out