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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Why don't people like lisp?
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2024 23:59:36 -0000 (UTC)
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On Tue, 02 Jul 2024 16:49:33 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote:

> Jeff Barnett <jbb@notatt.com> writes:
>
>> In Common Lisp, symbolic constants were defined for the IEEE plus and
>> minus infinities.
> 
> That's pretty horrendous either way (-99999 or -INF) .  Better to return
> an empty list in the event that that the input is empty.

If a function like “max” or “min” is defined to return a number, then it 
makes sense that the maximum of an empty list should be -∞, and the 
minimum should be +∞. Being numbers, they can be compared with other 
numbers in the usual way, and a lot of special cases no longer become 
special.