On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 3:37 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Wed, 04 Jul 2018 12:31:16 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > > [...] >>> Ah, I see we're not going to leave it alone. In that case, >>> "indefinite" >>> is a "number", in that it was a quantity you cited along with the other >>> two. If you'd prefer to call it a "quantity", that's fine with me. >>> Talk about pedantic... >> >> I've had debates with people about whether "infinity" is a number or >> not, but I've never yet heard anyone say that "indefinite" is a number. >> Hmm. This could be interesting. > > What, haven't you ever raced somebody to see who can count to 100 fastest? > > "One, two, skip a few, ninety-nine, one hundred!" > > Clearly "indefinite" is just a synonym for "skip a few". > > > For what it's worth, in the ordinary real numbers we all know and love, > infinity is absolutely not a number, full stop. There's no debate about > that.
I'm sorry Steven, you have a fundamental misunderstanding here. Not about the nature of real numbers or infinity.... no, about the nature of debate. It doesn't matter that there is a pure and simple factual answer; you can get into a long debate about it anyway. (For the record, I was on the "no, 'infinity' is NOT a number" side of that debate. It gets amusing when you do it in JavaScript, though, because Infinity is a value of the type Number, despite not being a number; and NaN is also something of the type Number, despite not being a number *or* infinity. Of course, in Python, those values are all of type "float" instead.) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
