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> From: Paul Schlie <schlie@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> The possibility that systems may implement exact infinities rules out
>> having the error be with INEXACT->EXACT (passed real infinities).
>
> - so what? (as personally I'd rather have an "exact" infinity returned
> for a calculation that would otherwise potentially crash the program
> attempting to allocate GigaBytes of memory to store an arbitrarily large
> "exact" result, or an "inexact" infinity which is known to possibly
> be smaller than the largest representable "exact" value.)
sorry, I'm not sure what I was thinking about when I responded to your
statement, but I'll try again:
- maybe that implies that infinities and their reciprocals are in a class by
themselves, as neither are warranted to have some minimal precision, as both
exact and inexact representations have, but rather represent an underflow of
the minimal precision otherwise warranted, thereby effectively representing
the bounds of an implementation's exact/inexact representations?
...
Thereby it becomes possible that:
(inexact->exact #i1/0) => #i1/0
Merely indicating the value was greater in magnitude than the greatest
representable inexact value, but less than the greatest representable
exact value, but without a minimally sufficient resolvable precision?
Implying something along the line of:
#e-1/0 .. #e-xxx .. #e-0/1 0 ...
| | | | |
#i-1/0 .. #i-xxx .. #i-0/1 0 ...