At 9:50 AM +0800 1/18/06, Audrey Tang wrote:
However, I think one of P6's idea is that the user should not have
to care between 0 and 0.0's behaviours, so maybe it makes sense to
do the same thing (be it NaN or exception) both ways.
I'm not sure that IEEE 754/854 still applies if we want to merge the
behaviours of int/num/complex/bigint/bigrat/bignum under a Num banner.
(There is always the worse-is-better option of going with whatever
the underlying runtime does, usually determined by hardware/libm.)
I think the best situation is that, at least with boxed types like
Num, behaviour should be well defined, user friendly, and identical
everywhere Perl 6 runs. There's no good reason to have different
behaviour on different platforms; that allows implementation to leak
through to the user when the user shouldn't have to know. And its
also a very good source of bugs. Leave different behaviours to
things that are explicitly connections to external resources, where
it is reasonable for them to change.
As for unboxed types, I'm on the fence here, but you should probably
let the implementation show through here, to an extent, since
presumably the point of using unboxed types is to get bleeding edge
maximum performance, and abstraction would take away from this then,
maybe. Or maybe not. But if anything bleeds through, it should be
the hardware, and not other programming languages.
-- Darren Duncan
