> On Apr 22, 2016, at 9:56 AM, Stephen Canon via swift-evolution
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>> On Apr 22, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Xiaodi Wu <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> Naive question: is it necessary to make a trade-off here? Why not an
>> associated type Exponent that's Int for Float, Double, and Float80,
>> allowing for something else for bignums?
>
> It’s an added (fairly minor) complexity to the API surface that confers
> approximately zero benefit.
>
So you admit the benefit isn’t *actually* zero? :-)
Yes, it does add a small bit of complexity to the API’s surface, but it's on a
part of the surface that I don’t think people look at very much. How often are
people extracting a float’s exponent? Plus, I suspect there’s a fair bit of
overlap between the group of people who even know what `.exponent` would get
used for, and those who’d get a warm fuzzy feeling from seeing that the
standard library has baked-in, low-level support for bignum / arbitrary
precision types.
Embrace the warm fuzzies… make exponent be an associated type.
- Dave Sweeris (who, despite the light-hearted tone, thinks this is actually
pretty important)
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