I support PEP 326
John Roth
newsgroups at jhrothjr.com
Fri Jan 23 07:14:10 EST 2004
"David M. Cooke" <cookedm+news at physics.mcmaster.ca> wrote in message
news:qnky8rzid3y.fsf at arbutus.physics.mcmaster.ca...
> At some point, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:
> > Gary Robinson wrote:
> >> If there anywhere else I should be expressing my opinion on this, let
> >> me
> >> know.
> >
> > Seems quite reasonable to me. The only issue I'd take with it is the
> > choice of Min and Max for the names of the singletons; they're a little
> > too close to the functions min and max, which obviously they're both
> > likely to be used with. I would suggest something a little more verbose
> > such as Minimum and Maximum, or if you want to get silly, Infimum and
> > Supremum.
>
> Or, expressing the idea that they're the ends of a number line:
>
> PosInf, NegInf
> PosInfinity, NegInfinity
> PositiveInfinity, NegativeInfinity
>
> If IEEE floating point was done correctly everywhere, I'd say make
> them the corresponding floating-point constants (Inf+ and Inf-).
If you do that you lose the ability to have those two constants be
in a list that *also* has end delimiters. A large part of the proposal
is that the end delimiters shouldn't have any other meaning: in other
words, there's no rational reason to use them in any other context
than ordering. (People will always come up with irrational reasons,
of course.) [grin]
John Roth
> --
> |>|\/|<
>
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
> |David M. Cooke
> |cookedm(at)physics(dot)mcmaster(dot)ca
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