high(float) & low(float)

[define-private-public]

There exists high(int) and low(int), but when I tried to do high(float), the compiler gave me an Error: invalid argument for 'high'

Is it possible to add high() and low() procs for the float type?

[Araq]

What that be? Floats support +-INF. When is this useful?

[define-private-public]

Sorry, didn't know about that. I was using it along with this random proc: http://nim-lang.org/docs/random.html#random,float

[dom96]

Wouldn't it make sense for high(float) to return INF?

[Araq]

And what would that accomplish? Which use cases does this cover? Why did we get away without for years?

[dom96]

It would save me time googling why high(float) doesn't work.

[define-private-public]

I think that might be an okay idea. It's logical if people think there is a high(int), high(short), high(char), they might assume that there is a high(float), even though floating point numbers are radically different. It would stop people from having to learn another "gotcha," for this language.

[Araq]

It would save me time googling why high(float) doesn't work.

You can save my time now and tell me why you wrote high(float) in the first place.

[Araq]

It would stop people from having to learn another "gotcha," for this language.

"My non-sensical expression didn't compile" is NOT a gotcha.

[tmerr]

Interesting... Rust's f32::MAX gives the highest finite value https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/f32/

[Yardanico]

@tmerr why it can be useful though?

[tmerr]

@Yardanico no idea. It seems like c++'s float max does the same thing: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/limits/numeric_limits/ . It would be good to understand the motivation for this before making a decision in nim

[yglukhov]

It might be useful for generic code, imo.

[johnnovak]

The only thing that would make sense to me is to return the highest/lowest safely representable value. But i'm finding hard to find a real-world use-case for this... The numerical limit constants are probably enough for all practical purposes.

[skilchen]

Just for fun, i was playing around with floats. If somebody is interested in some of the special floats, please take a look at: https://play.nim-lang.org/?gist=6dca0bb2f6b2fb99fa4fbb9e8af3d74a

[bluenote10]

Can be closed now that #6570 is merged.