On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Mike Cowlishaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Finally, I'd like to take a poll: Other than people working on decimal >> at IBM and people on the EcmaScript committee, is there anyone on this >> list who thinks that decimal adds significant value to EcmaScript? If >> so, please speak up. Thanks. > > Decimal arithmetic is sufficiently important that it is already > available in all the 'Really Important' languages except ES > (including C, Java, Python, C#, COBOL, and many more). EcmaScript is > the 'odd one out' here, and not having decimal support makes it > terribly difficult to move commercial calculations to the browser for > 'cloud computing' and the like.
Decimals in Java are implemented at the library level, as java.math.BigDecimal. There is no expectation that intrinsic math operators work on them. Is this approach valid for ES; if not, then why not? Implementing decimals at the library level has the advantage that they can be deployed today, as functional (if slower) ES code, and optimized later on by a native implementation with no loss of compatibility. After all, it will be several years before the next ES version becomes reliably available on consumers' browsers. Does this manner of easing migration inform the approach being taken? Conversely, if one is to add support for the intrinsic math operators on decimals, does the required work generalize easily to arithmetic on complex numbers and matrices? Will the addition of complex numbers and matrices require more difficult work about how they interoperate with existing number representations (including, at that point, decimal numbers)? How, if at all, does this inform the present discussion? Ihab -- Ihab A.B. Awad, Palo Alto, CA _______________________________________________ Es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
