[phkahler]

Posits handle this by using the smallest non-zero number where floating point would go to zero. They also use the largest represent able number instead of infinity. These exist for both positive and negative numbers. At least that's the way I read it.

[dnautics]

Co-inventor of posits here, this is basically correct, there still is "infinity" in posits, it's strictly reachable by inverting 0 directly.

[patrec]

Having a single (unsigned) infinity (and a single zero!) seems cleaner in some ways (and I dimly seem to recall that some pre-ieee754 floating point hardware worked that way). On the other hand, having e.g. a neutral element for both max and min also seems pretty nice to have, although without infinities, the maximal and minimal floating point value will equally do the trick in most cases.

How do inequalities work for posit infinity? Is posit infinity both larger and smaller than any other posit?

[phkahler]

I thought that was essentially NaN and could also result from square root of negative numbers?

[afiori]

a cons of that is that there is no longer a distinction between positive and negative infinity