At 09:24 -0800 1/2/07, Larry Wall wrote: >But I'm also still wondering whether a simpler approach is to declare >that Num is a role that can encapsulate objects of class Int, Num, >Rat, or Dec as necessary. There also a lot to be said for simple...
Simple. . . YES! but I'm in no position to help. Computer science has left me way behind. But.... I do a lot of computing and I do like perl 5. In fact, I use it on Mac OS neXt in preference to C or FORTRAN. I fully understand floats, integers, complex, vectors, and big numbers and I believe that's typical of folks who really use computers for computing. It would be nice if perl 6 would allow me, the user, to specify in advance just which numeric type I want. Incompatible usage would be an error that would be politely objected to by the compiler. How about a convention that integers begin with I, J, K, L, M, and N while others are floats? Perhaps those letters by themselves would imply that they are indexing quantities which should be assigned to hardware registers. Yeah, that's just to show how old I am. But why not an optional typdef-like facility in perl which would tell the compiler what I want? It could even be an O-O style instantiation. Separate sigl's, perhaps but some unicode specials - questionable. User-defined sigl's in a pragma? DIM statements? $Lynn / $Jill would be an integer divide using whatever arithmetic logic unit the machine in use provides. $Ross / $Todd would be done with the floating point processor. $Ross / $Lynn would convert $Lynn to a float and return a float. See FORTRAN conventions to continue. -- --> The greenhouse effect due to water vapor has never been fully modeled and weather forecasting remains irreducibly complex. It is clear that global warming is the act of an Intelligent Designer. <--
