On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 5:17 PM Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen...@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote: > > Chris Angelico writes: > > > In mathematics, "infinity" isn't a value. One cannot actually perform > > arithmetic on it. > > That's a rather controversial opinion. Even intuitionist > mathematicians perform arithmetic on infinities; they just find it > very distasteful that they have to do so. > > > Computers can't do that. > > This is flat wrong. It is very *inefficient* to have *current* > computers perform arithmetic on infinities (transcendental quantities, > etc), but Stephen Wolfram (and his net worth) would be very surprised > at your statement. >
Hang on hang on, transcendental quantities are still finite. It may take an infinite sequence to fully calculate them, but they are finite values. We're not talking about pi here, we're talking about treating "infinity" as a value. You can certainly do arithmetic on pi. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/VKEPF3HDS5WQRIV3AWS3PP524MT7AW6J/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
