On 13 September 2016 at 21:49, Waldek Hebisch <[email protected]> wrote: > > There is question of pragmatics. '<' has many valid uses. > '=' is more problematic, but still too useful to ban. > However, I see no natural uses which depend on 0^0 giving > 1. More precisely, the natural cases are when it is > known that exponent is exact. But in such case representing > it as floating point number is not so natural. > And since you have '<' and '=' you can roll your own > definition -- without '<' and '=' that would be impossible. >
To me 0^0=1 is part of mathematics. It is not subject to "pragmatics". It does not seem impractical to me to ensure that (0$DFLOAT) ^ (0$DFLOAT) = 1$DFLOAT and also to ensure that x < 0$DFLOAT and other similar expressions are well defined. This is a question of consistency. From my point of view the exponent is *always* exact by definition - only the computation that produced that exponent may (or may not) be exact. I am not sure what you mean when you say something is "natural". It seems very natural to me to depend on 0^0=1 and to not have to anticipate that this might produce an error message and terminate the computation. Bill. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
