> I have given enough arguments and should let other people express > their opinion without fearing an agressive response :)
In my opinion the behavior should exactly match the underlying binary representation of floats, otherwise I get results where I feel the system is 'fuzzing' while I didn't tell it to do so and I start to feel uneasy. So where VisualWorks does (13/10) = 1.3 "true" it makes me cringe, OTOH where it does 1.3 = 1.3d "false" it makes me feel right at home. At the heart of the matter is that we use /decimal/ floating point notation to represent /binary/ floats, and the issues (surprises for some people) of approximation should be put at exactly that conversion place and not compensated elsewhere -- this way we get a system with the least surprises. I am too new at Squeak to know how well separated #displayString (application behavior) and #printString (tools behavior) are, but it might help if the tools clearly show when the #printString of a float is approximate by prepending a ~ for example: 1.3 printString "~1.3" 1.0 printString "1.0" Regarding #asExactFraction I'd say that is an ugly pleonasm but more importantly it is confusing (it suggests that #asFraction is fuzzing), hence it should be deprecated; #asFraction should do an exact conversion IMO. R - _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
