On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 15:25:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On 6/23/16 11:16 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 13:57:57 UTC, Steven
Schveighoffer wrote:
Whenever you work with floating point, the loss of precision
must be
expected -- a finite type cannot represent an infinite
precision number.
The loss in precision should still be a warning. If I am using
reals
then I obviously needed a certain level of precision, I don't
want to
accidentally lose that precision somewhere because the
compiler decided
it was not important enough to warn me about it.
I disagree. I've used languages where converting floating point
types is not implicit, and it's painful. Most of the time, the
loss in precision isn't important.
This is so wrong. _especially_ when you have parameter
overloading/templates. It means that you accidentally can trash a
computation by getting the wrong function. That is not type-safe
in my book.
Jonathan's max-value example is a good one. The distinction
between infinity and a large actual value is an important one.
