From: Kent Dahl <kentda@...>
Date: 2003-01-18T06:28:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Accessing Infinity

Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> Well, Ruby's floating point number system does include two infinities,
> so I guess it's reasonable to compare with them...

This might sound a bit pedantic but:

Ruby doesn't provide the two infinitive numbers. The underlying floating
point routines do. So you don't have two infinities, since any Float
object can be infinite. You can have an infinite number of infinities. 

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> a = 1.0/0
Infinity
irb(main):002:0> b = 1.0/0
Infinity
irb(main):003:0> a.id
537929428
irb(main):004:0> b.id
537915848
irb(main):005:0> a.equal? b
false

So the only use for the Infinity constants I can see, is for clarity
(and space conserving) when you explicitly assign Infinity to more than
one variable. Creating them for comparison is just plain wasteful, as it
is one more object in ObjectSpace and a more complicated comparison,
having to look into two objects instead of one. 

IMHO

-- 
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