[Haskell-cafe] NaN as Integer value

Kim-Ee Yeoh ky3 at atamo.com
Mon Apr 15 02:53:59 CEST 2013


On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 3:28 PM, wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote:
> Whereas the problematic
> values due to infinities are overspecified, so no matter which answer you
> pick it's guaranteed to be the wrong answer half the time.
>
> Part of this whole problem comes from the fact that floats *do* decide to
> give a meaning to 1/0 (namely Infinity).

I'm not sure what you mean about overspecification here, but in
setting 1/0 as +infinity (as opposed to -infinity), there's an easily
overlooked assumption that the limit is obtained "from above" as
opposed to "from below."

-- Kim-Ee



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