On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 05:11:09PM -0800, Xah Lee wrote: > some additional info i thought is relevant. > > are int, float, long, double, side-effects of computer engineering? > > Xah Lee wrote: > «… One easy way to measure it is whether a programer can read and > understand a program without having to delve into its idiosyncrasies. > …» > > Chris Angelico wrote: > «Neither the behavior of ints nor the behavior of IEEE floating point > is a "quirk" or an "idiosyncracy". …» > > they are computer engineering by-products. Are quirks and > idiosyncracies. Check out a advanced lang such as Mathematica. There, > one can learn how the mathematical concept of integer or real number > are implemented in a computer language, without lots by-products of > comp engineering as in vast majority of langs (all those that chalks > up to some IEEEEEEE. (which, sadly, includes C, C++, perl, python, > lisp, and almost all. (Common/Scheme lisp idiots speak of the jargon > “number tower” instead IEEEE.) (part of the reason almost all langs > stick to some IEEEEEEEE stuff is because it's kinda standard, and > everyone understand it, in the sense that unix RFC (aka really fucking > common) is wide-spread because its free yet technically worst. (in a > sense, when everybody's stupid, there arise a cost to not be > stupid.)))). > > > A friend asked: «Can you enlighten us as to Mathematica's way of > handling numbers, either by a post or a link to suitable > documentation? …» > > what i meant to point out is that Mathematica deals with numbers at a > high-level human way. That is, one doesn't think in terms of float, > long, int, double. These words are never mentioned. Instead, you have > concepts of machine precision, accuracy. The lang automatically handle > the translation to hardware, and invoking exact value or infinite > precision as required or requested. > > in most lang's doc, words like int, long, double, float are part of > the lang, and it's quick to mention IEEE. Then you have the wide- > spread overflow issue in your lang. In M, the programer only need to > think in terms of math, i.e. Real number, Integer, complex number, > precision, accuracy, etc. > > this is what i meat that most lang deals with computer engineering by- > products, and i wished them to be higher level like M. > > http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/PrecisionAndAccuracyControl.html
Try Fortran. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
