On Apr 29, 2011, at 12:17 PM, Ronan Lamy wrote:

> Le vendredi 29 avril 2011 à 09:50 -0700, Tom Bachmann a écrit :
> <snip>
>> I don't really think it's worth the hassle fixing this as long as we
>> can only do trivial cases anyway.
>> 
> I think limit() needs to get smarter, not gruntz(). It should be able to
> perform appropriate simplifications based on the information that the
> variable goes to the limit point.
> 
>> On 29 Apr., 09:55, Tom Bachmann <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Evidently neither gruntz nor limit play along particularly well with
>>> infinities. Clearly this should be nan. I'll try to look into the
>>> gruntz issue today.
>>> 
>>> On 29 Apr., 09:25, smichr <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I would have expected NaN to be returned but I get:
>>> 
>>>>    h[1] >>> limit(x-oo,x,oo)
>>>>    oo
>>>>    h[2] >>> limit(oo-x,x,oo)
>>>>    -oo
> 
> I would argue that the correct results are limit(x - oo, x, oo) == -oo
> and limit(oo - x, x, oo) == oo.
> 
> The expression whose limit is taken belongs to the extended real line,
> so we need to consider the topology of the extended real line. Unless
> otherwise specified, limits are always evaluated for values of the
> variable close to, but different from, the "destination". In this case,
> this means arbitrarily large, but finite, reals. For any real x, x - oo
> = -oo, so the function Lambda(x, x - oo) is constant over the reals, but
> discontinuous, undefined actually, at x = +oo. However, the latter
> doesn't matter for the limit, and the result is the constant value, -oo.
> All this is completely parallel to limit(abs(x)/x, x, 0, '+'), for
> instance.

That's a good point.  Putting oo in an expression assumes the extended real 
line.  

Another idea is that if there were a way to take multiple limits at once, we 
could just replace all instances of oo with a second limit tending toward oo.

Aaron Meurer

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