http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8784
Don <clugd...@yahoo.com.au> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Status|NEW |RESOLVED CC| |clugd...@yahoo.com.au Resolution| |INVALID --- Comment #1 from Don <clugd...@yahoo.com.au> 2012-10-09 03:09:45 PDT --- For floating point numbers of limited size, you need infinity for overflow, and you can possibly also follow IEEE in generating it for division by zero. It's more a necessary evil than a desirable feature. But for BigInt it is quite different. There is no BigInt operation which results in an overflow, and division by zero is an error. And infinity is a really, really annoying special case, both in terms of implementation (where it has a performance penalty) and from the user's side. You have to sacrifice some important guarantees, eg assert(x + 1 != x); is not always true for any type which includes infinity. That sacrifice doesn't happen for IEEE floating point, since already x + 1 == x for any large number such as real.max / 2, due to reduced precision. But for BigInt, it's a huge price to pay. -- Configure issuemail: http://d.puremagic.com/issues/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: -------