-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/28/2010 04:45 PM, Scott McMurray wrote:
+Infinity represents the concept of something larger than any specific value you can state, and -Infinity something smaller.
So while you could choose to just use NaN in place of the infinities, there are situations in which infinity is reasonable where NaN is not.
Certainly.
Imagine a container of intervals, for example -- there, +/- infinity would be very useful for the two outermost endpoints. And something like atan(Infinity) can reasonably give \pi/2, whereas atan(NaN) can only give NaN.
No argument. But in the context of an integer library that will exactly represent any value that it can find the memory for, and will throw an exception if it can't get the memory it needs to represent a number exactly, I can't see much need for a specific value to represent infinity. In the case of boundaries provided to a function, the NaN value would represent the same idea as an infinity value -- that there is no specified boundary in that direction. If you can suggest a case where a separate infinity value would be necessary, I'll certainly add it. - -- 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/ iEYEARECAAYFAkuvzloACgkQp9x9jeZ9/wS5ZwCdG7MTk1b6wziIXXPBTsCL77H2 gS4AnRNBXFvlsTG0ae9OkpopFU6PRzLF =uYjy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----