Re: demonic problem descriptions

From: Christophe Turle (cturle_at_nospam.com)
Date: 02/06/05 

Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 21:37:01 +0100

"Kent M Pitman" <pitman@nhplace.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
uu0op4fxy.fsf@nhplace.com...
> "Christophe Turle" <cturle@nospam.com> writes:
>
>> "Christopher C. Stacy" <cstacy@news.dtpq.com> a écrit dans le message de
>> news: uhdkpsir8.fsf@news.dtpq.com...
>> > Can you show us some code in the other programming language(s)
>> > to which you are referring in which numbers with a decimal point
>> > do not indicate a floating point number?
>>
>> Perhaps some exists, but i don't know about. But it's not a sufficient
>> reason why it should be like this. Reasons must be objective ones not
>> 'follow others' ones.
>
> Fair enough. Please just give an "objective" description of the term
> "objective" and we'll be all set.

It is sufficient to say that we agree that this reason was NOT objective.

> Floating point is very close to this in the computer world, given that
> there is floating point hardware on nearly every machine,

Better and better. How didn't i think of it sooner ? I have to write my app
with floats because hardware use them ;)

> and decades of
> history involving thousands, perhaps even millions, of programmers who
> are familiar with the "meaning" of 0.11111 in computerese.

Sorry to don't write buggy, time consuming App because 'millions' of people
knows float theory. It's not because lots of people know assembler languages
that i will use them.

> As such, I would take Chris's question as an attempt to be objective,
> that is, to say that the existing mechanism and notation serves a nearly
> ubiquitous aspect of both notation and implementation that transcends
> programming languages and is not likely to change any time in the next
> year or two, nor probably much longer. That's a good floating point
> approximation to "objective" in my book...

True thing is to know what will win at last not during the next year.
Natural selection works even for programming language. I just hope we won't
be dead at this time.

>> > By the way, what TV channel frequencies are you being handed
>> > that are not conveniently represented by floating point?
>>
>> (rationalize 201.0053) ; in MHz
>> => 37990/189
>>
>> It works with double float. But the point is : why MUST i care about
>> float
>> type EVEN if i'm not concerned with optimization ???
>
> You don't have to at all. If you're not concerned about optimization,
> you're free to write and advertise a BCD library with appropriate readers
> and/or readmacros.

Yes, surely the way to go.

> Maybe you just want Scheme. In Scheme, they have an extra dimension
> of notational terminology for numbers--exactness vs inexactness
> (orthogonally to floating point vs integer, such that you can have
> exact floats and inexact integers).

Perhaps, i will look at it. 

-- 
___________________________________________________________
Christophe Turle.
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