[m-dev.] inf or infinity

[Ben Schmidt]

Thanks for the info and discussion. Looks like there are way more good reasons to 
use infinity than inf! Pretty impressed my ±∞ quip got a response....

Grins,

Ben.



On 13/08/14 5:39 PM, Julien Fischer wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Aug 2014, Ben Schmidt wrote:
>
>> On 13/08/14 3:30 PM, Julien Fischer wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Ben Schmidt
>> <schmidtb at student.unimelb.edu.au
>>> <mailto:schmidtb at student.unimelb.edu.au>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     I prefer the shorter 'inf', because you can also use 'NaN' (or 'nan'),
>> whereas
>>>     not_a_number is somewhat cumbersome.
>>>
>>>
>>> Using "infinity" does not mean we can not also use "nan".
>>
>> Of course, but I'm a programmer; I like consistency. :-p
>>
>> If you use 'inf', I'll automatically try 'nan' as it's the corresponding
>> abbreviation (and vice-versa). I would also guess 'inf' before trying
>> 'infinity', but that's probably as much to do with how I 'grew up' as anything
>> else.
>
> Another objection to "inf" is that mathematically "inf" is occasionally
> used as an abbrevation of "infimum".
>
>> If you use 'infinity', I'll stop and think "What am I supposed to use?"
>
> If you're using pure Mercury you shouldn't writing code that deals with
> NaNs, other than catching the exceptions that should result from them
> (at least that's the idea, see the comments at the head of the float
> module).
>
> ...
>
>> Is mercury unicode?
>
> That's a somewhat vague question, however, the status of Unicode
> support in Mercury is:
>
> * String literals, comments and quoted names can contain Unicode
> characters.
>
> * Text file streams are UTF-8 encoded (even on the non-C backends).
>
>> Just use ±∞. :-D
>
> No.  (It's not a valid unquoted Mercury name in any case.)
>
> Cheers,
> Julien.