On 2008-06-04, Bram Moolenaar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ben Schmidt wrote:
> > 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 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. I've refrained from commenting so far because I haven't had anything to contribute other than that I really prefer to have floating-point numbers that look like floating point numbers. Any other notation just looks silly. In addition, when putting floating-point numbers in a script, or when copying and pasting them into a vim expression, I don't want to have to remember to adorn them with any special notation, or to have to think about whether the adornment is needed in that context. The & prefix was thought to be needed to avoid breaking scripts that used . to concatenate two strings of digits. Ilya has demonstrated that, at least for publicly accessible scripts, this is not a problem. Using anything but the "standard" notation for floating-point numbers is going to lead to user confusion and errors. If these numbers were a new thing that had to be learned by everyone, the notation wouldn't matter as much. As it is, everyone "knows" how a floating-point number is represented in ASCII, so most people will use what they already know to write floating-point expressions in vim. It won't occur to them that vim uses a unique notation. For vim to depart from the conventional notation is aesthetically unpleasing, is going to cause problems, and at this point, seems to lack justification. My $0.02. Regards, Gary --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
