Working with the set of real numbers (was: Finding size of Variable)

[Grant Edwards]

On 2014-03-05, Chris Kaynor <ckaynor at zindagigames.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 9:43 AM, Steven D'Aprano <
> steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>
>> At one time, Euler summed an infinite series and got -1, from which he
>> concluded that -1 was (in some sense) larger than infinity. I don't know
>> what justification he gave, but the way I think of it is to take the
>> number line from -∞ to +∞ and then bend it back upon itself so that there
>> is a single infinity, rather like the projective plane only in a single
>> dimension. If you start at zero and move towards increasingly large
>> numbers, then like Buzz Lightyear you can go to infinity and beyond:
>>
>> 0 -> 1 -> 10 -> 10000 -> ... ∞ -> ... -10000 -> -10 -> -1 -> 0
>>
>
> This makes me think that maybe the universe is using ones or two complement
> math (is there a negative zero?)...

If the Universe (like most all Python implementations) is using
IEEE-754 floating point, there is.

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