[racket] Exact Infinity?

It's a bit of a philosophical problem to have an "exact" infinity. Writing your own such wrappers should not be too much work. I've done similar constructions in my own work in analysis, simply using the symbol 'ω for infinity.
-Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max New" <maxsnew at gmail.com>
To: users at racket-lang.org
Sent: Tuesday, March 4, 2014 12:08:03 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [racket] Exact Infinity?




I've been doing some work that uses a data structure that includes a size that can be either a Natural number of Infinity ,a so-called "extended natural number". 


I've been using +inf.0 and gotten by using `<` and `infinite?` and things have worked fine out of the box but now I need to take the minimum of such numbers, but 


> (min 0 +inf.0) 
returns 0.0, an inexact 0. This behavior is expected: http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/generic-numbers.html?q=inf&q=min&q=min&q=list/c&q=-%3E&q=define/contract#%28def._%28%28quote._~23~25kernel%29._min%29%29 because +inf.0 (and +inf.f) is a floating point number and thus inexact. 


I need to use exact naturals throughout however, so I can write a wrapper that takes the floor of the number after a call to min or I can define my own min that returns the original arguments. 



(define (mymin a b) 
(if (< a b) a b)) 


But would it be useful if exact infinities were added to the numeric tower? I'll call them +inf and -inf. Most operations like +, * etc could be defined easily though you would probably also want to add an "exact" nan for say (+ +inf -inf). The operations would work exactly the same way they do for inexact infinities, except returning exact numbers when possible, so for example 


(1 . / . +inf) ==> 0 
(min 34 +inf) ==> 34 


-Max Stewart New 

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