At 05:05 PM 11/6/2001 -0500, Jason Gloudon wrote:
>After looking at the internal data types PDD and the vtable PDD (which by the
>way is truncated on dev.perl.org in the pdd and HTML form), I can't make sense
>of the separate float_type and num_type declared in the vtable structure.
A variable with a numeric value can be taken in one of three ways:
*) As an integer. Which means either platform-native or bigint
*) As a float. Which means either platform-native or bigfloat
*) As a generic number. Which means platform native int or float, bigint or
bigfloat, or (possibly) a complex number.
It might end up that the distinction's just not worth it. We'll see.
>Also, the NUM, INT and STR types are being implemented as the concrete
>FLOATVAL, INTVAL, STRING types. This is not the design goal correct ?
>
>For example, the current get_integer vtable functions generated for the
>scalar class will only return INTVALs but my impression is that they could
>return INTVALs or BigInt values, so that the current scalar class function
>prototypes will eventually change.
Right, if you called the bigint version of get_integer you'd get a bigint.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
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