I personally think the current approach is right. Most people don't need arbitrary precision decimals, so it makes sense to have the fastest implementation used as the default. This also follows the "principle of least surprise" for people who are coming from other languages.
If someone really wants to use arbitrary precision decimals, they can ask for it explicitly. But it wouldn't make sense to force this (quite significant) overhead on people who don't want them (or don't even realise the difference). On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 23:47:43 UTC, Gary Fredericks wrote: > > Am I missing something? I realize doubles are generally faster because of > hardware implementations &c, but that seems orthogonal from the question of > syntax. I've several times thought idealistically that it could be better > to have the syntaxes switched (to reduce the amount of accidental floating > point use), and the only downsides I know of are A) surprising people > (especially people who think they can divide 2 by 3 without thinking about > it), and B) needing to be more careful when you're trying to use doubles > for performance. Maybe you were referring to B? > > Of course I do realize it's *way* too late to change it now ☺. > > Gary > > On Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 9:23:43 AM UTC-6, Alex Miller wrote: >> >> It's done this way for performance. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
