Infinity Is Not an Exception

From time to time I find some behavior that I cannot really neither explain as correct nor as incorrect. Best description would be peculiar.

Let's take simple code:

static void Main() {
    int x = (int)double.PositiveInfinity;
    Debug.WriteLine(x);
}

This will cause compile error "Constant value '1.#INF' cannot be converted to a 'int' (use 'unchecked' syntax to override)" and personally I view this as correct behavior.

Let's complicate things a little:

static void Main() {
    double posinf = double.PositiveInfinity;
    double neginf = double.NegativeInfinity;
    int x = (int)posinf;
    int y = (int)neginf;
    Debug.WriteLine(x);
    Debug.WriteLine(y);
}

Here I expected one nice runtime exception. However, I was greeted with -2147483648 as a result for both positive and negative infinity. This I did not expect.

My personal opinion here is that this operation should throw exception. I cannot see any sound reasoning for converting infinity to any finite number. It is called infinity for a reason!

However, I do notice that most of languages choose to have this conversion pass. Unfortunately for C# they (e.g. Java) opted for slightly different behavior.

Java converts negative infinity in same manner C# does but positive infinity gets converted to 2147483647. This may not seem like much, but this at least enables positive infinity to be larger than zero which seems mathematically sound to me (if we ignore all that infinity thing :)).

My personal opinion here is that exception should be thrown. Only thing that this conversion can lead to is data corruption - and this is not a good thing.

P.S. I reported this as an issue to Microsoft. I am really interested how they view this situation.

[2010-12-30: I got answer. It is by design.]