What exactly is "exact" (was Clean Singleton Docstrings)
Rustom Mody
rustompmody at gmail.com
Mon Jul 18 01:22:34 EDT 2016
On Monday, July 18, 2016 at 10:16:58 AM UTC+5:30, Ben Finney wrote:
> You will be able to express yourself much more clearly on this topic
> when you cease conflating a number with measurements of that number, or
> conflating a number with representations of that number.
>
That more or less sums up (my understanding of) scheme's intent of having
the exact/inexact classification: An inexact number is a measured/observed
number with that data intentionally preserved.
An exact number is just a mathematic number ie a plain ol' number
>From the scheme docs I earlier quoted:
| [Motivation for (in)exact...] the inexactness of a number (is a property
| that) should not be lost silently.
As Chris question/example illustrates this may be sufficiently messed up by
floats that the distinction may not be worth making. Dunno... Ive no definite
opinion/data on that. To put it simply float is such a grotesquely
unmathematical type that it is unlikely to cooperate with clean orthogonal
distinctions such as
- Exact/inexact types are orthogonal to the rest of the number hierarchy
- Modelling converts a ‘real-world’ measurement/observation into a mathematical entity
- etc
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