From: Mohammad Khan Date: 2004-09-02T23:13:48+09:00 Subject: Re: invisible Infinity Just curious, inf = 10.0/0 1.upto(inf) do | i | # do something end Is this an endless loop? Logically it should be. Mohammad On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 22:10, Ara.T.Howard@noaa.gov wrote: > On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > In message "invisible Infinity" > > on 04/09/02, gabriele renzi 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 > =============================================================================== -- Mohammad Khan Legal Computer Solutions, Inc.