On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Joe Schaefer <joe_schae...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Honestly I'd say that if anything is clear, > it's that changing away from the status quo > currently enjoys zero consensus. > > As a Ph.D. mathematician who knows about Bourbaki, > all I can say is that line of argument is curious > here. There are no authorities other than the spec > to turn to about how you want POWER(0,0) to behave- > as a function of 2 variables returning an error is > probably best mathematically because the POWER > function isn't remotely continuous at (0,0)
Sure it is not continuous at 0,0 but the sign function is not either, that does not prevent sign(0) to be defined a 0 So continuity is not a necessary requirement. >, but as > part of an implementation of power series > representations of sums involving 0^0, returning 1 > is better. Indeed. I guess my point was : '0^0=1 is obviously(sic) mathematically wrong' is just non-sens. There are valid backward/cross-ward compatibility arguments, there are valid implementation/performance arguments. but the 'Mathematical correctness' argument (for either 1 or undefined) is completely bogus. Norbert
