An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)
An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)
Posted Jul 19, 2015 11:20 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice) by mchapman
Parent article: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)
You can's satisfy all parties because use of fractions where floating point numbers are requested satisfy noone. It's like UTF-8 vs UTF-16. With UTF-8 you need to learn to live with with variable character width early and thus have a chance to produce working program. With UTF-16 your program pass all tests with flying colors (beause they all use BMP) yet fail for real users. Similarly with "fractions vs floating point numbers": if you language introduces floating point numbers early in (as in: 0.1 is not precisely 0.1) and distinguishes it from fractions (think guile: 7/2 will be 7/2 there it'll never automagically become 3.5) then you have a chance, if your language "does basic math" right then you will happily rely on it till you'll need sinus or square. Then you'll continue to rely in the fact that you language does basic math right, only to find out too late that sin2x + cos2x is not always 1.
Posted Jul 19, 2015 12:03 UTC (Sun)
by mchapman (subscriber, #66589)
[Link]
I don't think of 0.1 as "requesting" any kind of numeric type. It's just a real number.
In Perl 6 that literal does happen to create a Rat value. But that sounds reasonable to me -- all decimal real numbers *are* rational. 0.1 and <1/10> are just two different textual representations for the same value.
So what if you really want to "request" a floating-point value for some reason? Easy: simply use that Rat as a floating-point value. You could assign it to a Num scalar, or you could use it with some operator or method that only works with Nums. It's easy enough to do the conversion. It is, after all, exactly the same conversion most other programming languages do when they interpret the decimal form in the first place.
To be honest, I would not be surprised if Perl implementations skip the Rat value completely if the decimal literal is used somewhere where it will be immediately used as a floating-point value. If the Rat temporary value isn't externally visible, constant-folding can turn it into a constant Num instead.
Posted Jul 20, 2015 8:39 UTC (Mon)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link]
Any programmer who thinks that computers implement "basic math" is simply incompetent... unless you're doing purely symbolic calculations and/or have infinite-length registers.
[Yes, I did fall into that trap once or twice when I was at the university. But then I learned about proper numerical algorithms, numerical (in)stability etc. and I'm no longer incompetent ;)]
An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)
An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)