2008/2/20 Adam Peller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Mark, as I recall, the discussion at the March meeting in Newton involved > implementing decimal arithmetic in ES3.1 to *replace* the floating point > implementation in ES3, thus "no new syntax". Yes, this would have unexpected > results for those who actually have code logic which expects a value of > "46.19" pounds, in Mike's example (see Numbers thread) but the benefits here > seemed to far outweigh this discrepancy. I can't speak to the technical > level of detail that Mike can, but at a high level it's seen as a bug by the > vast majority of users, and for all practical purposes, that's what it is.
I was not at the March meeting. If decimal is sufficiently compatible with binary double precision floating point to keep old programs working, I might be willing to consider *replacing* double with decimal. How compatible are they? What numbers are representable as double but not decimal? Does decimal have NaN, Infinity, -Infinity, and -0.0? (Btw, I never liked -0.0. And I especially dislike ES3's behavior that 0.0 === -0.0. However, I would argue against making incompatible changes to this.) The other design constraint is that ES4 be a compatible superset of ES3.1. In light of your message, I checked the ES4 wiki pages. <http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=proposals:numbers&s=decimal> seems to imply that use of ES3 syntax for numbers is to be interpreted (approximately) according to ES3 rules. Are the ES4 folks willing to *replace* binary floating point with decimal and drop the decimal literal syntax? If not, then I don't see how we could allow decimal into ES3.1. -- Cheers, --MarkM _______________________________________________ Es4-discuss mailing list Es4-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es4-discuss
