[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why purely in haskell?

jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

...

Personally, I loathe the existence of NaN and +-Infinity in floating point types.

I conclude that you live far from the numeric world. But I was raised as physicist, and without them, the implementation of several algorithms would be extremely difficult.

Hm. Can you give an example? (A web link, maybe to a paper or some, such would be enough). I am asking because I am used to calculating with infinity from integration theory where the rationale is similar: formulation of most of the basic theorems would loose a lot of its elegance if the 'infinite case' had to be handled explicitly. Cheers Ben