Even for real numbers, typemin and typemax don't always work – consider BigInts.
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Stefan Karpinski <[email protected]>wrote: > Extrema make sense for any collection you can sort. E.g.: > > julia> words = shuffle!(map(chomp,open(readlines,"/usr/share/dict/words"))) > 235886-element Array{ASCIIString,1}: > "Lobelia" > "maddeningness" > "oases" > "kindler" > "upgang" > "inequable" > "stramony" > "rhagon" > "whizzer" > "intercollegian" > ⋮ > "drearily" > "dramatizer" > "furacity" > "opsistype" > "carrying" > "unfulminated" > "inadaptive" > "dermographism" > "rhabdomancy" > "exhaustively" > > julia> maximum(words) > "zythum" > > > > On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:41 PM, Andrew Dabrowski > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> I had assumed that minimum only worked when T <: Real. A finite >> collection of elements of an arbitrary type need not have a max or min in >> any natural sense. >> >> >> On Tuesday, April 1, 2014 12:33:39 PM UTC-4, Stefan Karpinski wrote: >>> >>> Type stability is the main concern and consistency is the other. You >>> want minimum(::Vector{T}) to return an element of type T but not all T have >>> an infinite value. >>> >>> >
