Re: [FWP] Fun with infinity

[Bart Lateur <bart.lateur@skynet.be>]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 18:18:14 +0200, Julien Quint wrote:

>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".

That probably ought to be "-inf", otherwise this would be absolutely
wrong. Anyway, on my system, it doesn't fly. "-inf" is not numeric.

But anyway, this reminds me of some threads in comp.lang.perl.misc a
little while back, on how there were differences between perls on
different platforms to be observed, WRT other strings used as numbers:
"NANsomething", and "0x12".

Here's 2 randomly picked messages from these 2 threads, on
<groups.google.com>:

"operators: != vs. ne, strange behaviour", 26 messages
<http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=m3d7a2ywy0.fsf%40dhcp9-172.support.tivoli.com>

"Strange string -> num conversion", 37 messages
<http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=9cp7pk%24evtle%241%40ID-13368.news.dfncis.de>

I hope the mailer doesn't mess up the URL's too much.

I think the consensus was that it all depends on your linked in C
library.

-- 
	Bart.

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