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Talk:Extreme floating point values: Difference between revisions
IEEE draft terminology vs. mathematics
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:They are values of the IEEE floating point type. --[[Special:Contributions/71.141.138.49|71.141.138.49]] 04:33, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
::Do you know if the IEEE spec' uses a blanket term for them? I had hoped to leave the description loose enough for those using other floating point spec's to adapt accordingly and form their own entries. As the very informative Ada entry has managed to do. ( Yeah!) --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 05:43, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
:::The term ideal is used in mathematics, at least in some textbooks. It is something that does not exist in the set. -1 is an ideal added to natural numbers to have 0-1. j is an ideal added to real numbers to get sqrt(-1). Infinity can be added to get 1/0.
:::I looked in IEEE 2006 draft [http://www.validlab.com/754R], it uses ''infinity'' and sometimes ''infinite number''. I must say I don't like ''infinite number'' because +∞ does not look like a number. As for ''quantity'' it does not look good either, because quantity is a measurable property, like 5.4 meters or 3 apples. Infinity as defined by IEEE 754 is not measurable, not even in terms of cardinal numbers. It is "bigger" than any cardinal. By the way ''extreme'' is also a term, which does not apply to infinities and infinitesimals. At least I was taught that an extreme does not exist if not finite. NaN they call "Not a Number, a symbolic floating-point datum." Well, ''symbolic datum'' is definitely better than anything else, e.g. number, quantity or value, because data can be both quantitative and qualitative.
:::Finally, I agree that NaN, infinity etc are definitely values of a floating-point type. E.g. NaN is a value of double in C++. But there is a difference between the semantics (mathematical meaning of NaN) and the types system (bit patterns considered valid representations for some type, they can be any). --[[User:Dmitry-kazakov|Dmitry-kazakov]] 19:23, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
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