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Infinity recognized as number

by fglock (Vicar)
on Nov 22, 2002 at 16:48 UTC ( [id://215169]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

fglock has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

perldelta (5.6.1) says:

    Infinity is now recognized as a number.

I'd like to find out what it means, since it doesn't seem to work in Perl expressions like:

 print 1 + Infinity;   # prints "1"

I also tried "Inf", "inf", "infinity", but nothing seems to work.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Infinity recognized as number
by Nitrox (Chaplain) on Nov 22, 2002 at 17:09 UTC
    Perl handles infinity as IEEE 754 standards, read more here.

    -Nitrox

Re: Infinity recognized as number
by crenz (Priest) on Nov 22, 2002 at 17:08 UTC
Re: Infinity recognized as number
by fglock (Vicar) on Nov 22, 2002 at 18:22 UTC

    Thanks all. The point is, Perl prints out the Infinity number as "Inf" (FreeBSD) or "inf" (linux). What I learned is that the string "Inf" is just a string.

    Now I'm using $inf=10**10**10

      FWIW, perl 5.16.1 :)
      $ perl -e " print 1 + Infinity " 1.#INF $ perl -e " print 1 + inf" 1.#INF $ perl -e " print int inf" 1.#INF $
Re: Infinity recognized as number
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Nov 22, 2002 at 17:03 UTC

    I don't know where all it comes into play but try this:

    #!/usr/bin/perl my $int = 999999999999999999999999999999999999; print $int**$int,$/;

    It outputs: 1.#Inf

Re: Infinity recognized as number
by shemp (Deacon) on Nov 22, 2002 at 18:08 UTC
    Nothing to do with infinify, rather a comment on perls numeric interpretation of scalars.
    using the addition operator "+", perl will use its numeric interpretation of both operands.
    1 evaluates to 1 (like you'd expect)
    "Infinity" evaluates to 0 ("zero")
    so the addition results in 1

    in general, when perl needs a numeric interpretation of a scalar, the value is the value of the maximal length numeric substring that starts at the first character of the scalar.

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