On Saturday, 14 April 2012 at 10:38:45 UTC, Silveri wrote:
On Saturday, 14 April 2012 at 07:52:51 UTC, F i L wrote:
On Saturday, 14 April 2012 at 06:43:11 UTC, Manfred Nowak
wrote:
F i L wrote:
4) use hardware signalling to overcome some of the limitations
impressed by 3).
4) I have no idea what you just said... :)
On Saturday, 14 April 2012 at 07:58:44 UTC, F i L wrote:
That's interesting, but what effect does appending an invalid
char to a valid one have? Does the resulting string end up
being "NaS" (Not a String)? Cause if not, I'm not sure that's
a fair comparison.
The initialization values chosen are also determined by the
underlying hardware implementation of the type. Signalling NANs
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN#Signaling_NaN) can be used
with floats because they are implemented by the CPU, but in the
case of integers or strings their aren't really equivalent
values.
I'm sure the hardware can just as easily signal zeros.
On Saturday, 14 April 2012 at 07:45:58 UTC, F i L wrote:
My original post was inspired by me showing my D code to
another C# guy earlier, and coming up with poor explanations
as to why floats where required to be defaulted in my math
lib. His reaction what along the lines of my first post.
I think the correct mindset when working in D is to think that
"all variables should be initialized" and if you get incorrect
calculations with zero values, division by zero errors or nan
errors the most likely mistake is often that this guideline was
not followed.
Like I said before, this is backwards thinking. At the end of the
day, you _can_ use default values in D. Given that ints are
defaulted to usable values, FP Values should be as well for the
sake of consistency and convenience.
You can't force new D programmers to follow a 'guidline' no
matter how loudly the documentation shouts it (which is barely
does at this point), so said guideline is not a dependable
practice all D will follow (unless it's statically enforced)...
nor _should_ the learning curve be steepened by enforcing
awareness of this idiosyncrasy.
The correct mindset from the compilers perspective should be:
"people create variables to use them. What do they want if they
didn't specify a value?"
therefor our mindset can be: "I defined a variable to use. Should
be zero so I don't need to set it."
