On 6/30/2011 13:56, bb wrote:
Am 30.06.2011 11:53, schrieb Randal L. Schwartz:
"bb" == bb<bblo...@arcor.de> writes:
bb> onionmixer.net/extra_data/gst.pdf
You keep bring up GNU Smalltalk.
Not to be annoying, but you *do* realize this is a *Squeak* Smalltalk
newbie list. If you want to get started with Squeak, check out the
Squeak tutorials athttp://squeak.org/Documentation/
I brought up GNU Smalltalk for a good reason:
I miss that clearification concerning FloatD/FloatE/FloatQ *in any
documentation about squeak*.
<... snip ...>
So it should be legal to compare to i.e. "Draft American National
Standard for Information
Systems - Programming Languages - Smalltalk" and ask about such
Smalltalk-80 topics including compatibility. Ironically one can download
it from the squeak wiki
(wiki.squeak.org/squeak/uploads/172/standard_v1_9-indexed.pdf). So if
you do not like GNU Smalltalk, read page 28 of "Draft American National
Standard for Information Systems - Programming Languages - Smalltalk"
instead:
"An implementation may support up to three different floating point
numeric representations with varying precision and ranges ..."
You should have said this to begin with. Up until this point your
question did sound like you were simply asking in the wrong place.
But that source does not explained why squeak does have asFlotD/E/Q as
well.
Simple: Ansi says that an implementation MAY support different floating
point numeric representations. Squeak only supports one, Float. However,
in order to support ANSI compatible code that would rather use
particular representations, it implements the messages by returning the
only representation that it supports. So that client code that asks for
it gets the (only) available approximation for the requested
representation. Whether that is good enough or not is a different matter
(personally, I have not seen code that uses #asFloat[E|D|Q]) but this is
a best effort solution.
I would be thankful if you give me an advice, where I should aks my
questions if not at the beginners mail list?
This is the right list. But in the future please provide the relevant
context such as the reference to the ANSI standard. Asking a question
like "Why does Foo Smalltalk have class Frobnifier?" is likely to get
you a response along the lines of "you should ask the people who use Foo
Smalltalk". However, asking the question in the form "In Foo Smalltalk
there is class Frobnifier to deal with frobnification. Is there an
equivalent class in Squeak, or if not, how would you frobnify using
Squeak?" is perfectly appropriate. It's all about the context.
Cheers,
- Andreas
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