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How do I type a floating point infinity literal in python?
I have heard
inf = float('inf') is non portable. Thus, I have had the following recommended:
inf = 1e400 Is either of these standard, or portable? What is best practice?
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But in python, as it is a dynamic language, float values can be used to represent an infinite integer. One can use float('inf') as an integer to represent it as infinity.
In Python, there is no way or method to represent infinity as an integer. This matches the fundamental characteristic of many other popular programming languages. But due to python being dynamically typed language, you can use float(inf) as an integer to represent it as infinity.
The float type in Python represents the floating point number. Float is used to represent real numbers and is written with a decimal point dividing the integer and fractional parts. For example, 97.98, 32.3+e18, -32.54e100 all are floating point numbers.
In python 2.6 it is portable if the CPU supports it
The float() function will now turn the string nan into an IEEE 754 Not A Number value, and +inf and -inf into positive or negative infinity. This works on any platform with IEEE 754 semantics.
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float('inf') is non portable as in not portable back to Python 2.5 when the string output varies between platforms. From 2.6 and onwards float('inf') is guaranteed to work on IEEE-754-compliance platforms (ref: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0754/).
(And the recommendation seems to be in the range 1e30000, not just 1e400.)
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