Michael Lazzaro wrote: <snip>
Hmm, that's not overpoweringly ugly. Looks nice, even. The fact that it doesn't generalize is a little awkward.
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. :-)
I think "easy enough with a grammar munge" gets tossed around way too often; don't forget, in addition to having to know how to hack the core grammer (which I assume won't be for the novice; how often does it happen in perl5?), you'll have to write the code so that compiler knows how to handle it. While not overly hard, I think its a little much for something that should be provided in the core. I think the design team should at least account for the fact that someone will want to do this, even if it is uncommon. If floating point radii doesn't make its way in the core language, I think it should at least be possible through a pragma.
(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 !)
Now even I think that is *Just Plain Wrong* :) Joseph F. Ryan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
