Yes. I have the impression that the representation should give the indication of the fuzzyness of the numbers.
Now it would be nice that we are of a kind of fix point around this nice discussion :) From what I heard I would like to give a try to the solution proposed by nicolas and also see if we could improve the user experience. I should reread my scheme Stef > > 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 _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
