On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 12:04 AM, Michael Zedeler <mich...@zedeler.dk> wrote: > > So far, almost every other language has behaved this way, and it has > worked. I can see that Rats do solve a problem, but if you'd claim that it > is very severe then I'd disagree. This is a minor nuisance that I'd only > pay a small price to fix. >
People who use your lovely example – spreadsheets – tend to disagree. There was a LOT of noise about how Excel handled numbers in a very surprising manner, every time a "new" problem came up. There are a gazillion articles about how to avoid it, and people who deal with spreadsheets spend inordinate amounts of time to get around it. Or they take the performance hit for asking for the precision of numbers "as displayed". For more information, please see here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/78113 The "minor nuisance" is not so minor out there in the real world, where people use actual applications where they _expect_ WYSIWYG numbers. Now, what Rats solve for us programmers, is that it makes it easier for us to avoid these pitfalls, and thereby makes it easier for us to cater for our users. -- Jan
