You're making a logic insinuation here that anything C# does is good enough for Java. That is not a self-evident statement and you haven't bothered to logically defend it. Therefore your entire reasoning is faulty; the 'implementation detail' that is IEEE-754 is extremely leaky, and anyone programming with doubles and floats that isn't aware of the various caveats of IEEE-754 numbers is going to make grave errors. Thus I'm fairly sure your analysis that MIN_VALUE isn't necessary is in fact hogwash. You do need it.
Is it a good name? Not really, its not always evident what it does, and in general a constant name should be clear without needing to read documentation. Also, Integer.MIN_VALUE means something entirely different, making it worse. So, necessary? Yeah. Badly named? Yeah. Seems simple enough. On Oct 18, 4:08 pm, Casper Bang <[email protected]> wrote: > > There is a need for smallest Double.MIN_VALUE being positive because there > > is are gaps in the range of values that can be expressed by a Double. > > Internal irrelevant stuff the user shouldn't be bothered with. It's > the same kind of implementation leak seen elsewhere in Java, i.e. > BigDecimal's broken equals method where 3.1 isn't equal to 3.10. > > > It makes perfect sense to have Double.MIN_VALUE so one can determine the > > boundaries of what numbers can be represented by a Double at <a> and <b> in > > the above nasty range. > > The C# implementations have no trouble offering just MaxValue, > MinValue, PositiveInfinity and NegativeInfinity. If you need arbitrary > base-10 precision, there are datatypes for that (BigDecimal and > decimal). > > > Also calling the constant FRACTION or some derivative would be wrong as that > > is not the official term -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point. > > Whether you want to refer to it as significand, mantissa, coefficient > or donut is irrelevant - I am sure you can see that "value" is > somewhat treturous. I.e. Double.valueOf(...) does NOT exclude the > exponent part. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
