[PD-dev] [float infinity] and [float -infinity]

[Jamie Bullock]

On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:51:53 -0500
Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org> wrote:

> 
> You might notice, I am doing some math these days ;).  I just had  
> another idea for a handy thing when doing math: a method of getting the  
> smallest and largest possible numbers.  Basically, the Pd version of a  
> #define INFINITY 1e37 (or whatever it is).
> 
> I think it would be handy to have as part of [float], like this:
> 
> [float infinity] and [float -infinity]  (FLT_MAX and FLT_MIN)
> or maybe:
> [float max] and [float min]  (FLT_MAX and FLT_MIN)
> 
> Other float.h defines would also be handy to have access to:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Floating-Point- 
> Parameters.html
> 
> Something like this:
> 
> [float max_exp] (FLT_MAX_EXP)
> [float min_exp] (FLT_MIN_EXP)
> 
> And perhaps [int] could also have the relevant versions of the same  
> too.  I guess that would just be:
> 
> [int infinity] and [int -infinity]
> or maybe:
> [int max] and [int min]
> 
> I don't think I'll have time to code this any time soon, but I can put  
> it into feature requests...
> 
Please do. I would also find this really useful. I recently wrote an external to help remove infs and NaNs from data I was sending to a database, and needed to write a another silly extern to to generate the values to test it! Something like that should definitely be possible with 'builtins'.

Jamie