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1 point by rocketnia 4389 days ago | link | parent

Does Nulan give access to 'write? That would distinguish them.

"I prefer to view integers as being a subset of floating point[...]"

I don't know about that. What happens with very large, but exact, integers?

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"[...]so I prefer to see 1 and 1.0 as identical. Is there a reason not to?"

Actually I think there is a reason. We're talking about exact and inexact numbers here. If you want to know that a number is exactly 1, then 1.0 doesn't give you enough information. :-p

Personally, I think floating point numbers mostly get in the way. I'd rather treat them as a separate concept, even if it means using a special +. operator like OCaml.

I don't see much need for complex numbers, rational numbers, or negative numbers either, but at least their addition and multiplication are still associative.



1 point by Pauan 4388 days ago | link

"Does Nulan give access to 'write? That would distinguish them."

Not if I change printing to always use floating point, or print exact floating points as integers. :P I actually did something like that with Arc/Nu: I was tired of typing in (/ 1 5) and getting back 1/5, so I changed Arc/Nu to print exact numbers as if they were inexact, so it would print 0.2. This only affects the printing, not the actual math stuff.

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"I don't know about that. What happens with very large, but exact, integers?"

I dunno, what happens in Racket?

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"Similarly, in JavaScript I tend to use Arrays of strings, storing them as their ECMAScript 5 JSON representation."

Ah yeah, that works, I didn't think of that.

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2 points by rocketnia 4388 days ago | link

"I dunno, what happens in Racket?"

Actually, this is going a bit off topic, since it doesn't especially matter to me whether exact integers are a subset of inexact numbers. I thought I even deleted this part of my reply, but oh well. XD

Looks like the racket docs say[1] Racket's inexact numbers are IEEE floating-point numbers of single or double precision, with double being the default. So they don't preserve integers beyond 53 bits:

  > (define foo 12345678901234567890)
  > foo
  12345678901234567890
  > (inexact->exact (exact->inexact foo))
  12345678901234569216
  > (number->string foo 2)
  "1010101101010100101010011000110011101011000111110000101011010010"
  > (number->string (inexact->exact (exact->inexact foo)) 2)
  "1010101101010100101010011000110011101011000111110001000000000000"
Odd, this suggests Racket double-precision floating-point numbers have only 51 bits of mantissa rather than 52, so maybe they actually only preserve integers up to 52 bits...?

[1] http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/numbers.html

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1 point by Pauan 4387 days ago | link

I "solved" this issue by simply making all numbers 64-bit floating point. The change was really easy to make. I didn't do it because of this issue, though. I did it because I want to eventually compile to JS, and JS only has 64-bit floating point.

Though, it also makes it easier conceptually to only have to worry about floating point, as compared to floating point + integer + rational + complex + whatever else Racket has. Even if you divide numbers into exact/inexact like Racket does, that's still more complicated than only having a single numeric type.

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1 point by rocketnia 4386 days ago | link

"I did it because I want to eventually compile to JS, and JS only has 64-bit floating point."

JavaScript supports a 52-bit mantissa. Are you willing to have that discrepancy of one bit of precision?

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1 point by Pauan 4385 days ago | link

Yes.

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