Help me understand infinity

Ali Lloyd ali.lloyd at livecode.com
Wed Jul 29 18:17:35 EDT 2020


I wonder if I can persuade the team to let me add a constant for the first
uncountable strongly inaccessible cardinal.

Regarding use-cases, I like the following one which is implicit in the
above observations about comparisons between infinity and integers.
Previously I would do the following a lot:

local tMin, tThisResult
repeat for each element tElement in tList
   -- perform some computation on tElement to get tThisResult
   if tMin is empty then
      put tThisResult into tMin
   else
      put min(tMin, tThisResult) into tMin
   end if
end repeat
Now you can do:

local tMin, tThisResult
put infinity into tMin
repeat for each element tElement in tList
   -- perform some computation on tElement to get tThisResult
   put min(tMin, tThisResult) into tMin
end repeat

On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 at 20:47, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

>
> On 29/07/2020 20:17, Dr. Hawkins wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 29, 2020, at 12:08 PM, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode
> > <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Any number compared to positive infinity (other than itself) *will*
> >> be less than it.
> > Bah,
> >
> > *ℵ*_2 > floating point infinity (which is *ℵ*_1 )
> >
> Maybe in the real universe. Or in the realm of mathematics.
>
> But in the domain of computers &  IEEE, any *number* is smaller than it.
>
> (Since NaN is, well, not a number :-)
>
> Alex.
>
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