On Wed, Feb 08, 2012 at 02:50:55PM +0000, David House wrote:
> On 02/08/2012 02:39 PM, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
> >People. Please. Tell me you are *not* arguing over underscores in
> >numeric literals !
>
> This is not totally academic. I have come across the exact bug I
> describe. It was painful.
[...]
Let me guess where the problem might be came from:
When i think of code that uses a value
1_000_000
and you want to change it to a value ten times higher,
it should be changed to
10_000_000
Coming from notation that does NOT allow "_" in tzhe numbers,
it could be done by just adding one "0" at the end of the value:
1000000
becomes
10000000
^
with the "0" added at the end.
But also correct ("more correct" would be:
1000000
becomes
10000000
^
"0" added at the millions.
"Just add one "0" at the end"
Is the edit-habit, which works fine.
But when allowing "_" inside numbers,
but people don't change the "wrong" editing behaviour,
then allowing the "_" at all means introducing a new kind
of possible errors.
This could be an argument to throw "_" at all,
because adding a "0" after the "1" instead of just
adding a "0" at the end is rarely used behaviour of editing,
and some people might call it "weird". ;-)
So this argument also could be used to disallow "_" at all.
But no, thats not what I want to argue for ;-)
OK, let's stop that discussion now.
If someone thinks the three-digit-distance-"_" is a feature that makes sense,
a feature wish could be added for OCaml. ;-)
Ciao,
Oliver
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