From: Yuri Tzara Date: 2010-11-25T05:22:37+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9 Phillip Gawlowski wrote in post #963658: > > It cannot be infinity. It does, quite literally not compute. There's > no room for interpretation, it's a fact of (mathematical) life that > something divided by nothing has an undefined result. It doesn't > matter if it's 0, 0.0, or -0.0. Undefined is undefined. It is perfectly reasonable, mathematically, to assign infinity to 1/0. To geometers and topologists, infinity is just another point. Look up the one-point compactification of R^n. If we join infinity to the real line, we get a circle, topologically. Joining infinity to the real plane gives a sphere, called the Riemann sphere. These are rigorous definitions with useful results. I'm glad that IEEE floating point has infinity included, otherwise I would run into needless error handling. It's not an error to reach one pole of a sphere (the other pole being zero). Infinity is there for good reason; its presence was well-considered by the quite knowledgeable IEEE designers. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.