Re: +oo / -oo (infinity)

[Andreas Enge <andreas.enge@inria.fr>]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 12:14:33PM +0200, Karim Belabas wrote:
> It's a bit sad to "waste" a type for only two objects so far, but it was the
> only sensible possibility. (I definitely didn't want to abuse one of the
> existing types, e.g. taking advantage of "impossible values" for t_REAL
> codewords.) 

It is not clear whether this would have been abuse; it could have been an
extension of the reals towards the IEEE semantics, maybe even with something
like 1.0/0.0=+oo. In particular for the example you give of an integral,
there is a notion of "real number" behind the infinity, unlike for the
polynomial degree.

Andreas