Ruby Quicktips

How to define infinite numbers

You can define the “number” ‘infinity’ (or ‘-infinity’) in Ruby like this:

1.0/0
=> Infinity

-1.0/0
=> -Infinity

Infinity and -Infinity behave just like you expect them to: they are always bigger - or always smaller, respectively - than any number you compare it to.
The Xing Devblog had a great post recently about using Ruby’s infinity in Rails, with some thoughts on when you might want to use it (or not).

P.S.: the Float class in Ruby 1.9.2 provides an Infinity constant you can use:

Float::INFINITY
=> Infinity

This tip was submitted by makoto.