Re: Math Libraries (was Re: Ada2005)

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

You are suggesting some version of specifying a "digits" clause but no
"delta"? Then presuming the underlying implementation is some version of
packed-decimal, performing effectively floating point math with some
arbitrary number of digits?

That I might put into the "Nice To Have" category, but I'm not sure the
language would need a new data type. There are packages that define big
number arithmetic & perhaps using some version of that would be a good place
to start to see how useful it might be. Creating a new numeric type could be
useful from a language standpoint since all the presumptions could be there
about math operations, etc. (A private type with math ops defined just
doesn't quite cut it - consider generics as an example) but I'd want some
evidence that there is some significant user base that needs it before
making it a language extension...

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1008921920.25553.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> From: Bob Leif
> To: Marin Condic et al.,
> I agree; however, I believe that a decimal floating type should be created
> or a work-around be provided to circumvent the static restrictions on type
> decimal. I still wish to be able to specify the exponent at run-time.
> PC performance has long since passed the point of needing to match the
> numeric format to the machine instead of the human. For most commercial
> uses, decimal numbers are a much better choice than binary numbers.
>