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Infinities.

The arithmetic operations of Erable accept infinity arguments. The $+\infty $ symbol may be obtained from the keyboard by $\alpha $-right shift-I in normal mode or $\alpha $-right shift-DEL in user mode followed by ENTER. The $-\infty $ symbol is obtained by hitting the quote key, the - key and $\alpha $-right shift-I or $\alpha $-right shift-DEL followed by ENTER. $\infty $ and $-+\infty $ are understood as unsigned infinity (with the following exception: $\infty $ is understood as $+\infty $ in a bound of an integral or in a LIMIT instruction). The ? symbol means that the result of an operation is undefined. All operations involving ? will return ? after simplifications.

Remark 7   The current release returns ? for some expressions which are not undetermined, like $(+\infty )^{-\infty }$.

Be aware of the fact that arithmetic operations on infinities may return false answers because Erable can not check for nullity if non rational expressions are encoutered. For example $(\sin(2x)-2\sin(x)\cos(x))/0$ will return $\infty $ instead of 0. This remark applies to the LIMIT instruction too (call SERIES if the answer of LIMIT seems false).



Bernard Parisse
1998-07-31