"Richard Fateman" <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
...
> I think the more troublesome problems with inf and und (etc)
> is that such symbols HAVE participated in arithmetic in some ways, leading to
> peculiar situations.
> along with constants of integration, intervals, and perhaps other items, these
> "names" have tended to get re-used. E.g. some program returns "undefined" two times,
> and subtracts one from the other to get 0.
Ouch; that hurts.
One extreme solution (but not too unreasonable, in my opinion) is
simply to completely disallow inf and und in arithmetic. Are you
suggesting something like that?
Jay