Sujet : Re: Why don't people like lisp?
De : ldo (at) *nospam* nz.invalid (Lawrence D'Oliveiro)
Groupes : comp.lang.lispDate : 03. Jul 2024, 01:59:36
Autres entêtes
Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID : <v62497$1rh22$1@dont-email.me>
References : 1 2 3 4
User-Agent : Pan/0.158 (Avdiivka; )
On Tue, 02 Jul 2024 16:49:33 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:
Jeff Barnett <jbb@notatt.com> writes:
>
In Common Lisp, symbolic constants were defined for the IEEE plus and
minus infinities.
That's pretty horrendous either way (-99999 or -INF) . Better to return
an empty list in the event that that the input is empty.
If a function like “max” or “min” is defined to return a number, then it
makes sense that the maximum of an empty list should be -∞, and the
minimum should be +∞. Being numbers, they can be compared with other
numbers in the usual way, and a lot of special cases no longer become
special.