I don't really think this is about *understanding* the difference between floats and ints. You can be well aware of the difference and still find it annoying when you are forced to explicitly do the conversion when it's obvious that there is only one thing that could possibly work and that thing is safe and correct. That's how most of Julia works – if you assign an integer-valued float to an integer-typed field or array, it just does the conversion for you. I just don't really see a particularly good reason why indexing with integer-value floats shouldn't work the same way.
On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 6:35 AM, Andreas Lobinger <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Monday, March 16, 2015 at 8:46:36 AM UTC+1, Christoph Ortner wrote: >> >> >> I agree it is easy to learn, but numerical analysts are *not* computer >> scientists, nor should they be expected to be. >> > > From wikipedia i read: Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm> that use numerical approximation > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximation> (as opposed to general symbolic > manipulations <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_computation>) for > the problems of mathematical analysis > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_analysis> (as distinguished > from discrete mathematics > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_mathematics>) > So i somehow expect some understanding about discretization of numbers. I > agree that NAs do not need to know the background how numbers are > represented in the computer. > > >
