You’ll sometimes have to use the notion of infinity in your Ruby code. There isn’t any way to directly use infinity in Ruby, at least none that I know of… But there’s a tip to get it.

Let’s say that you have a next_row method which has to return next line of an infinite array – rows are added on the fly by another process.

In practice you’ll certainly use #loop but we’re going to use #each for the sake of demo.

def each
  0.upto(1.0/0.0) { yield next_row }
end

A quick test in IRB tells use that 1.0 / 0.0 is interpreted as Infinity:

>> 1.0/0.0
=> Infinity

To use Infinity directly without this trick you can use:

>> Float::INFINITY
=> Infinity

Now our #each implementation will loop forever. It’s definitively not the right solution to loop over elements but I thought it was interesting to know this little Ruby secret.

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