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Comment by repsilat

3 years ago

TFA neglected to mention that floats have an "infinity" value, quite a bit larger than any 64 bit busy-beaver.

(And before anyone says it's not a number, call `isnan` with an infinity and get back to me :)

I don't believe IEEE 754 specifies which infinities it encodes as its positive and negative infinity. I'd tend to treat it as the surreal equivalence class {0,1,2…|}, but it might be any of the others.

  • IEEE 754 is very clear that the infinities are the endpoints of the extended real line (and hence also the extended integers, which matches your assumption).