On Jul 8, 2009, at 1:31 PM, Hernan Wilkinson wrote: > > So, I would like my programing language to be aware of this because > most of the programers do not have such a good skill on numbers as > you do, and I think programing language should be closer to people > than to hardware.
As a counterexample: we readily accept that precedence rules in smalltalk are different than in mathematical notation, 1 + 2 * 3 is interpreted differently in the two notations. So IMO we should lean towards writing programming syntax, not shoe- horning mathematical expectations in there too much. (Mainly because trying to impose mathematical notation will give wrinkling and ripping in all kinds of unexpected places in the system). > [...] and if you write 1.3, the object that represents that number > is not going to be an instance of float but of scaledecimal or > fraction or whatever, but not float... That only solves the issue of representing literals because: > and all operations are made with exact representation. cannot be done for all operations: obvious ones like square root, log, sin, etc and less obvious ones like #squared where you run out of enough bits to maintain precision (in fixed-width implementations). R - _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
