On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Tim Peters wrote:
Last week I took some time to stare at the ABC manual again, & suspect I hit on the cause: ABC was *aggressively* rational. That is, ABC had no notation for floating point (ABC "approximate") literals; even 6.02e23 was taken to mean "exact rational". In my experience ABC was unique this way, and uniquely surprising for it: it's hard to be surprised by 2/3 returning a rational, but hard not to be surprised by 6.02e23/1.0001e-18 doing so.
Ouch. There is definitely place for floats in the numeric tower. It's just that those shouldn't be reached accidentally <0.3 wink>
one-case-where-one-size-doesn't-fit-anyone-ly y'rs - tim
but-in-this-case-two-sizes-do-seem-enough-ly y'rs, Z. -- Moshe Zadka <mzadka@geocities.com>. http://www.oreilly.com/news/prescod_0300.html http://www.linux.org.il -- we put the penguin in .com