From: Brian Schroeder <spam0504@...>
Date: 2004-09-02T04:05:22+09:00
Subject: Re: invisible Infinity

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 18:05:43 +0000, gabriele renzi wrote:

> Hi gurus and nubys,
> 
> I wonder, if you divide a Float by zero, you get Infinity:
>  >> a=10.0/0
> => Infinity
> 
> 
> and you can even write code using Infinity like:
>  >> 0.upto(a) do |x| p x end
> 0
> 1
> 2
> 3
> ..
> 
> but if you try to access it directly you can't:
>  >> Infinity
> NameError: uninitialized constant Infinity
>          from (irb):4
> 
> Should we be able to access Infinity directly? It seem a strange
> unexplicable behaviour to me, that it exists but is not normally
> accessible.


I also was surprised, that Infinity is no predefined constant, as I used
it in some algorithm where I needed to fill an Array with infinity, then
iteratively reducing the values. In these cases infinity is much better
than nil as a special value because it can be compared.

So I declared 1.0/0.0 as Infinity and ready. But I regard it as against
the pols.

Greetings,

Brian


-- 
Brian Schr�der
http://www.brian-schroeder.de/