On Wednesday 11 August 2010 23:40:17 Daniel Murphy wrote: > Do we really want the sqrt of a integer to return a real? > I would expect it to return floor(sqrt(n)), in the same way that integer > division does. > What do other people think/expect?
That seems rather limiting. Don't you usually want a floating point value from sqrt? If you want an int, you can just cast the result. Otherwise, you're going to have to cast the ints that you pass to sqrt() in order to get a floating value result, which would tend to be even more annoying - particularly since I would expect the programmer to want a floating point result normally anyway. On top of that, because an int value can be held just fine in a floating point, making sqrt() return an int could easily cause bugs where someone expects it to return a floating value and assigns it to a floating value. The assignment works just fine, but they never get the result that they expect, and they may have a hard time tracking down such a bug. If it returns a real, then it does what I would expect most people to want, and if you want an int, you have to cast it. It's nice and clear, and you don't have errors due to something being a type that you don't expect. - Jonathan MDavis _______________________________________________ phobos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/phobos
