-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 04/02/2010 03:27 PM, DE wrote:
Arbitrary-precision integers. But it could sometimes be useful to have a value representing infinity, just as it's sometimes useful to have one representing Not-a-Number.
i agree with the presence of NaN and i agree that NaN should propagate when exceptions are blocked
but nobody convinced me so far of usefulness of infinities in an integer domain
I tried to come up with an example, but I couldn't think of anything useful, or even contrived. I was considering it because Scott McMurray pointed out that it would be useful for containers of intervals, and that a NaN value wouldn't be sufficient there. I can see his argument, but I'm not familiar with any use of intervals.
as well as signed zero
We're still arguing that.
I can see some very limited uses for calculations with infinities, mostly involving endpoints in a range.
that seems very doubtful to me
I'm still struggling to see where it's necessary too. Most of those "very limited uses" that I mentioned above would be in generic code, and I can't for the life of me think of an example of them. - -- 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/ iEYEARECAAYFAku2jSgACgkQp9x9jeZ9/wQlAwCfdZ3qTNizXkLHNJ57ctcrpckp fDwAoM4WxzJTAtlr1VtDOjKMNHbdPc5w =a7VC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----