Ben Schmidt wrote:
> The earlier thread where Bram asked for comments on floating point
> syntax, after quite a few suggestions were made and rejected for
> compatibility reasons, petered out. However, two proposals were made
> that I think had merit, and I wonder if people have additional comment
> on them, and perhaps may see them if part of a new thread!
>
> The first proposal was mine:
>
> - I pointed out that there is actually possibly ambiguity in the current
> syntax unless a float is required to have a decimal point or exponent,
> as &123.456 could mean float 123.456 or float 123 (123.0) concatenated
> with integer 456. If the requirement is added, the ambiguity is
> removed, but &123 is invalid, which is a bit of a shame.
The "." operator only works on strings. There is no automatic
conversion of a float to a string, so a "." after a float is invalid.
And with a single "." it's part of the float, no matter what follows.
> - I proposed an alternative syntax that I prefer and I think is likely
> to be more robust in the long run: enclosing floats in curly braces.
> E.g. {123.456}. Specifically, a set of curly braces would be taken to
> represent a float if and only if it is (1) not preceded by a valid
> variable name character and (2) contains a valid float. Nobody came up
> with any reason this would not work.
It would work, but I think &123.456 looks better than {123.456}. And we
might want to use {} for something else (if possible, since it's already
used for curly-braces-names).
> The second was a proposal to represent floats as numbers with decimal
> points but no additional punctuation which was implicit in this report
> from Ilya Bobir:
>
> - I did a search for vim scripts that use concatenation operation
> between two numbers without interleaving space. It appears that
> Google Code Search was able to find only 39 matches and all were
> false positives.
>
> Nobody gave any reply to the message.
I wonder how you do that search. And if you manage to come up with the
right pattern, what the number of matches actually means.
> I would like to note, though, that this doesn't solve the problem for
> exponent notation. However, I suspect a search of vim scripts containing
> numbers of that form would yield even less results, though I have not
> tried it. The search also doesn't take into account expressions that may
> be built dynamically in vim scripts rather than being hard coded, but
> again, I doubt many if any of these exist.
>
> I personally would prefer either of these syntaxes to the notation with
> the ampersand.
>
> Do people have further comments/thoughts on this? Is Bram still
> interested in hearing them?
Yes, but most people appear to be OK with the &123.456 syntax. Thus if
you want something else, you need to come up with good arguments.
> The earlier thread which contains more details can be read here:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/vim_dev/browse_thread/thread/1c8806e536ec12cd
>
> The relevant posts are at the end. The last 7 or so, which happen to
> nicely form the second page of posts at present.
--
It doesn't really matter what you are able to do if you don't do it.
(Bram Moolenaar)
/// Bram Moolenaar -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
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\\\ download, build and distribute -- http://www.A-A-P.org ///
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