From: Ara.T.Howard@...
Date: 2004-09-02T11:10:21+09:00
Subject: Re: invisible Infinity

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In message "invisible Infinity"
>    on 04/09/02, gabriele renzi <rff_rff@remove-yahoo.it> writes:
>
> |Should we be able to access Infinity directly? It seem a strange
> |unexplicable behaviour to me, that it exists but is not normally accessible.
>
> Considering non IEEE platform, there's no portable way to generate
> Inifinity and NaN, I think.  Teach me if I'm wrong.
>
> 							matz.

is it an impossible idea to map the various Nan's to some singleton like
InfinityClass - for which Infinity would be the only instance, similar to
FalseClass and TrueClass?  we could also have NegativeInfinity as well.
operators for these singletons would be defined as

   class << Infinity
     def < other; false; end
     def > other; other == self ? false : true; end
   end
   class << NegativeInfinity
     def > other; false; end
     def < other; other == self ? false : true; end
   end

the reason i say this is that the notion of infinity is useful for many
things, like Time and Date, not just Numeric.

perhaps this is too hard to make generic - but it would be a very useful
paradigm to have at one's disposal.

kind regards.

-a
--
===============================================================================
| EMAIL   :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| PHONE   :: 303.497.6469
| A flower falls, even though we love it;
| and a weed grows, even though we do not love it. 
|   --Dogen
===============================================================================