On Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 10:22:10 PM UTC-4, Anonymous wrote: > > Have the Julia developers considered the effects of setting Base.min()=Inf > and Base.max()=-Inf. This is common in real analysis since it plays nice > with set theory, i.e. >
It only plays nicely with sets of real numbers. What about sets of other types that have a total ordering? e.g. strings? Also, one of the general principles guiding the design of the Julia standard library is to provide idioms that don't cause types to change arbitrarily underneath the user; this principle is critical to being able to use the standard library in high-performance code (since type stability is critical to compiler optimization). For example min(1,2) == 1 (an Int), min(1) == 1 (an Int), but then min() = Inf (floating-point)?
