An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 27, 2015 17:08 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice) by Cyberax
Parent article: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

> Like not being able to tell whether it's float, rational or bigint.

You're almost getting it now, yes. Don't you just hate it when mathematical operators are commutative and return *numbers*? How dare they.

Maybe I should have used a more extreme example: "(a + b) * a / b". Does that return a number, a string, or a runtime error?

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 27, 2015 17:13 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

>Don't you just hate it when mathematical operators are commutative and return *numbers*?
WHICH numbers? They behave differently.

> Maybe I should have used a more extreme example: "(a + b) * a / b". Does that return a number, a string, or a runtime error?
In Python it's either a floating number or a runtime error (barring bizarre operator overloads).