On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 05:29:18PM -0400, Chas Owens wrote: : Okay, obviously I have more synopsis to read, but currently Pugs says: : pugs> my $posinf = * : Inf : pugs> my $neginf = -* : -Inf : : which made me think * is Inf in scalar context. Is this a bug in Pugs then?
Yes, basically. * should not be committing to a numeric type (which Inf is at heart), since we want 'a'..* to work as alphanumeric "infinity" too. And while we could maybe fudge that one to respect Inf, other uses of * require that Whatever be a completely separate, non-confusable type for multiple dispatch purposes. : Is Inf the canonical way of spelling the literal "infinity"? Yes. It's more or less the IEEE definition of infinity, though we allow Int to be +/- Inf as well as Num. However, native int cannot hold Inf, though native num can, presuming IEEE floaters are supported, which all modern hardware does. : I am patching Pugs' x and xx operators to handle infinity now. The : behavior after the patch is : pugs> "a" x 5 : "aaaaa" : pugs> "a" x 0 : "" : pugs> "a" x -5 : "" : pugs> "a" x Inf : Internal error while running expression: : Infinite replications would exahust memory : pugs> "a" x -Inf : "" : : Besides fixing the spelling error on exhaust and making it a real die : instead of an internal error (which I have yet to figure out how to : do), does this match up with your expectations for the replication : operators? That's how x would work. See S03 for a description of how xx works. Larry
