Re: Thieves Philosophy 101

[olcott <olcott@qwest.net>]

Jeff Blakeney wrote:

> On Mon, 12 Feb 2001 16:18:23 -0600, olcott <olcott@qwest.net> wrote:
>
> >Its just that the semantics are so slippery here...
> >
> >while(true)    ==   while(true)      ==    Infinity   ==    1/0
> >  N++;                    N += 10;
> >
> >I am impying no such thing, note that these are infinite loops.
>
> The first two are not equivalent.  They are similar in that they are
> both infinite loops but they change at different rates so therefore
> they cannot be considered equivalent.
>

So Infinity + 1 < Infinity + 10 ?

>
> And yes, the first two are infinite loops but they are not equivalent
> to infinity.

Infinity != Infinity (the infinite nature of these loops makes them equivalent)...

> They always have a finite value as a result.  They may

The termination value of these loops == Infinity

>
> run for an infinite amount of time but that does not make them
> equivalent to infinity.  That's like saying:
>
>      while(N<1000)    ==   1 minute
>          N++;
>
> Finally, it has already been shown to you that infinity is not
> equivalent to 1/0 as any number divided by zero is undefined.  As you

As the denominator gets smaller the number gets bigger,
thus as the denominator gets smallest the number gets biggest.

>

>
> approach division by zero, you approach infinity but you can never
> reach it.

>
> At any rate, this is a silly thing to be arguing about as infinity
> already has a perfectly good definition.  Besides, this is totally off
> topic for this newsgroup and I always feel bad when I post off topic
> stuff so I'll stop now.
>
>  Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II Unversity on A2Central.com