On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: : From: Mark J. Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] : > Summary of values: : > : > 1/0 +Inf : > -1/0 -Inf : > 0/0 NaN : > Inf/0 NaN : > Inf/Inf NaN : : Are Inf and NaN going to be standard in Perl 6?
I don't know if they're "standard", but it has to be drop-dead easy to add them. : As long as we're traveling : down that road, how about i (the square root of -1), or Lukasiwiscean Null? : (Sorry if I sound sarcastic, I'm actually honestly curious.) Obviously complex arithmetic is important to a sizable set of people, and they want it to be fast. : My inner Larry Wall is right now saying that there needs to be a more : generalized solution to all this. OK, here's one. By default, anything/0 : throws an exception. However, you can load modules to handle those : exceptions, substituting Inf, NaN, or whatever as the evaluation of the : expression. You can control how things compile in a lexical scope via pragma, and you can control how division is implemented for a class via overloading. That's probably enough control to get wherever you want without implicitly throwing and catching exceptions. Larry
