On Wednesday, 2 July 2014 at 21:44:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/2/2014 2:33 PM, Sean Kelly wrote:
On Wednesday, 2 July 2014 at 20:37:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I'm afraid that would not only break most D programs, but also
interoperability with C.
Could you explain this? I didn't think we used 'real' to
interface with C at all. We might need a type to match 'long
double' in C, but what that is is already exceedingly variable.
This would probably be another case for a special alias like we
have for c_long.
C long double == D real for 32 and 64 bit OSX, Linux, and
FreeBSD.
And it's 'double double' on PPC and 128 bit quad on SPARC.
Assuming D targets those platforms, what will be the behavior
there?
From my perspective, it seems like 'real' in D is utterly
non-portable given its definition. I can see maybe using it in
some cases if I knew I was targeting a specific architecture
where the added precision was helpful, but for general purpose
programming I'd always either use 'double' or some library-based
type for extended precision, simply to have some assurance that
my result would be predictable. Am I wrong in this?
