Numeric comparison anomaly

[Paul Rubin]

"Piet van Oostrum" <piet at cs.uu.nl> writes:

> Yes, of course, but I mean that I consider this an incorrect
> definition of __cmp__. 
> 
> class A:
>      def __cmp__(self, other):
>          return self is not other
> would be better.

Hmm, I guess that's an improvement but still leaves an anomaly:

   inf1 = A()
   inf2 = A()

   print (inf1 == inf2)

would then print 0.  

Anyway I didn't really need a general infinity.  I just wanted a simple
way to write a loop with an optional maximum count:

   n = 0
   while n <= limit:
      if some_test(sequence[n]):
         break

Letting limit be infinite was the simplest way of expressing that I
sometimes didn't want to have a limit.