Those are good points, although I always kind of wondered why Float gets Inf while Int doesn't, I guess there's no way to have Inf belong to 2 distinct concrete types.
On Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 8:08:19 PM UTC-7, Steven G. Johnson wrote: > > > > 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)? >
