Perl is worse!

[Suchandra Thapa]

Grant Edwards <nobody at nowhere.nohow> wrote:
>As long as the conversion can guarantee no information loss, I wouldn't have
>a problem with it.  I've yet to use a language that can make that guarantee.
>I guess I never looked into the details in Python (haven't done much
>numerical stuff yet).  I had sort of assumed that floating point values were
>32 bit, but if they're 64, then as you say, the problem is postponed until
>long ints are involved.

    I believe scheme can guarantee no information loss for the conversion
listed above since it has an explicit rational type.  I suspect lisp
may have similar features. Some of the functional languages like haskell
and ML may do the same.  If not, it should be relatively easy to add such
a by introducing a rational type and coercion routines for ints to rationals.
Incidently, ML is a completely type safe language and people who use it 
like the fact that if your program compiles then there are guaranteed to
be no type errors in it at all. 

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Suchandra S. Thapa 
s-thapa at uchicago.edu

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