On Thu, Aug 1, 2024 at 8:41 AM Alan Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Seems like a design flaw in BASIC. Since FP numbers cannot exactly > represent all numbers that can be written in decimal (unless it's some kind > of BCD format), it really should be keeping those FP numbers stored in a > decimal or string format. > > It gains a massive performance improvement by not doing so. There are > always tradeoffs. Classic BASIC is clobbered on performance by a bunch > of things but all the string to float parsing is one of them. > > Yeah, I get it. But given that one would expect some serious warnings about floating point literals in the manual explaining the problem and how to make literals that will round-trip through tokenization/detokenization Or... when it detokenizes for LIST or EDIT it should always give the closest value that will round-trip, to stop the insanity. Woulda coulda shoulda -- John.
