Re: Making 'eq' == 'eql' in bignum branch

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 2018-08-28 23:22, Elias Mårtenson wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 at 02:19, Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden 
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>  
> 
>     FWIW, I'm not a fan of using either (min) or (max) to represent minus 
> infinity; it looks a bit odd.  Many other languages have an infinity constant 
> already, so that pattern is well established; making (max) an alias for 
> either of the infinities is prone to introducing confusion.
> 
> 
> For anyone curious, the way to do it in APL is ⌈/⍬ and ⌊/⍬, which literally 
> means take the max and min values of an empty list, so it's not completely 
> unheard of.

Let me amend what I wrote above.  I'm not excited about (max) becoming the 
common spelling for negative infinity, but I'm fine with changing max to accept 
zero arguments and return -infinity in that case (and, indeed, that's the only 
value that makes sense to me).

I'd simply prefer to have a more explicit spelling for both infinities, and if 
1.0e+INF if too hard to remember, a new read syntax or a new defconst would 
have my preference over (max) and (min).

Clément.