[seqfan] Re: Contributing sequences with holes and infinities

[Neil Sloane]

I think ?, UNK, INF, NA, etc. are OK for statistics or physics, but are not
really appropriate for the OEIS.

You can always add an a-file with all the known and unknown terms.

In general OEIS entries stop at the first term that is not known for
certain.

Usually we use -1 for a term that is known to be infinite (explaining this
in the definition, of course)

Best regards
Neil

Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation.
11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
Email: njasloane at gmail.com


On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Wayne VanWeerthuizen <waynemv at gmail.com>
wrote:

> In my opinion, it would be nicer to have OEIS directly accept UNK
> (unknown) and INF (infinity) as values. I don't know how time consuming
> this would be to program, giving all the things OEIS and Superseeker do.
>  Also, it could break other peoples' programs that use data downloaded
> from OEIS. But ultimately, I think updating the software to have UNK and
> INF as distinct allowable values would make sense and be useful.
>
>
> On 6/17/2016 10:53 AM, Christian Stump wrote:
> >> As long as our knowledge of a particular sequence is ad hoc, the
> solution
> >> has to be ad hoc as well.
> >
> > I think this is correct for sequences containing infinity, as these
> > are strictly speaking not integer sequences. A principal proposal for
> > placeholders of unknown values is the obvious "?" symbol. I agree that
> > this might be hard to actually make happen for technical reasons and
> > design decisions -- but I find that certainly better than not
> > submitting a sequence at all due to several missing small values.
> >
> > Cheers, Christian
> >
> > --
> > Seqfan Mailing list - http://list.seqfan.eu/
> >
>
>
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