On Saturday 09 April 2016, Paul Eggert wrote: > On 04/08/2016 01:51 PM, Ruediger Meier wrote: > > On Friday 08 April 2016, Paul Eggert wrote: > >> For this I suggest the following heuristic. When inferring a > >> format that would apply to two or more lines of output, try > >> formatting the first two lines and report an error if they are the > >> same. > > > > Hm, I think printing identical lines is a valid use case: > > $ seq -f "%0.1f" 0 0.02 0.1 > > 0.0 > > 0.0 > > 0.0 > > 0.1 > > 0.1 > > 0.1 > > Sure, but the heuristic I suggested was for inferred formats only. It > was not intended for formats explicitly specified via -f. > > > I would check it before the loop like this > > > > if ((first + inc) == first) > > /* exit error */ > > I think I'd prefer testing what the user would see, instead of > testing some internal variable. > > > maybe the user _wants_ an effective endless (non > > trivial) sequence > > If we make an increment of zero an error, then there's no way for the > 'seq' user to say they want an endless identical sequence. But > there's always the 'yes' program for that.
I've ment effective (feels like) endless. $ seq 0 1 1.0e+100 would run more than 10^93 seconds on my system (about 10^83 times the age of the universe). The increment sum-up would become imprecise and behave like zero much earlier. cu, Rudi
