On Sunday, November 24, 2002, at 04:16 AM, Richard J Cox wrote:
We could adopt the C99 version and use "p" or "P" for hex decimal values (this, reportedly, allows certain values not expressible in decimal for floats to be specified).Hmm, that's not overpoweringly ugly. Looks nice, even. The fact that it doesn't generalize is a little awkward.
Thus
0x.4Ap10
0xA.BCDp-15
(The exponent cannot be in hex in C99).
However this clearly cannot generalise for all bases <= 36...
I'm still thinking that, unless someone comes up with a really compelling real-world reason to *have* floats in bases other than 10, we shouldn't ask the design team to add it to the language. It certainly wouldn't be missed by 99.999% of the population.
It will be easy enough to add as a grammar munge later, for the elite set of sixteen-fingered people who find working in base 10 floating-point disdainful. :-)
(Ooooh, there's another idea we _SHOULDN'T_ pursue... adding postfix '%' to mean 'percent', but in any radix. So 0x80% of 0x10 would be 0x08 !)
MikeL
