We're going to have a problem if "infinity" is not allowed in the presence of some programmers. "All values" can mean too many things in too many situations. And I don't think using * works here, quite, precisely because it can mean too many things.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 1:32 PM ToddAndMargo <toddandma...@zoho.com> wrote: > On 9/26/18 11:34 PM, JJ Merelo wrote: > > > > > > El mié., 26 sept. 2018 a las 23:31, Laurent Rosenfeld via perl6-users > > (<perl6-users@perl.org <mailto:perl6-users@perl.org>>) escribió: > > > > You can set a limit to the number of items (words) you want to > > retrieve: you will get only the first $limit words. > > > > If you don't supply any limit, Inf can be thought as the default > > value for the number of items, i.e. there is no limit and the > > routine will return as many words as it can from the source input. > > > > > > And this is one of the things I love Perl 6 for, its consistency. > > Infinity is literally no limit. Using it meaning "no limit" is genius. > > Not "0 in this case means no limit" or "-1 means no limit" or "this > > constant meaning unavailable" or whatever. Infinity has no limit, we use > > them as a parameter to imply that argument has no limit. > > > > Cheers > > > > JJ > > > Hi JJ, > > The more I learn about Perl 6, the more I prefer it over Perl 5. > > To your list, I might add, everything starts counting from zero > (Perl5 m/ starts at $1). So no guessing! > > My problem with the default set to Inf is that Inf means a number > too large for the numbers of bits allocated to the variable to > handle. > > RTFM: https://docs.perl6.org/type/Num#index-entry-Inf_%28definition%29-Inf > The value Inf is an instance of Num and represents value that's > too large to represent in 64-bit double-precision floating > point number (roughly, above 1.7976931348623158e308 for > positive Inf and below -1.7976931348623157e308 for negative Inf) > as well as returned from certain operations as defined by the > IEEE 754-2008 standard. > > So how am I suppose to enter that as a value? What it really means > is "all of them". "Inf" is just a poor way of stating "all words" > as the default. "A tremendously large numbers of words" is just > a weird way of saying "all of them". > > And yes, I am blanking on how to best clean that up. We have no > value (that I know of) for "all". > > -T > -- brandon s allbery kf8nh allber...@gmail.com
