[FWP] Fun with infinity

[Julien Quint <julien.quint@imag.fr>]

Hi all,

Does any one know where I can find information about the seemingly magical 
string "inf" ? It looks like this string -- and even, *any* starting with 
"inf", "+inf" or "-inf" (this seems to come from the IEEE standard on 
floating numbers) -- behaves like the infinity, i.e. any number will be
lesser than "inf" and greater than "+inf". Since I found no documentation on 
it, I guess it is quite a hidden, perhaps old feature; but it was pointed out 
to me that there was a bug fix in perl5.6.1 related to it -- it does not 
issue any warning when compared to a number.

So, where is it documented, and it is a good idea to use it? I found some 
traces in perldata and some mentions to NaN in perlop, but that's not much... 
Also, I'm not sure that "inf" == "inf" should return 1 (my math classes are a 
long time ago, but still), which is the case now.

Thanks for all comments and info!

Julien

==== Want to unsubscribe from Fun With Perl?  Well, if you insist...
==== Send email to <fwp-request@technofile.org> with message _body_
====   unsubscribe