Re: gnuplot cvs source bug

[Robert H. <en...@no...>]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 14:57 +0200, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> Well, you don't have a computer with a mind-reading interface, do you? 
> So how do you expect it to be able to know what you *think*, 
> particularly in a case like this where what you think openly disagrees 
> with what you actually told it via keyboard?

Do you actually believe that? Even if you are a C programmer, and you
understand why there is a distinction between 2/3 and 2.0/3.0 this must
still catch you out time and time again?

Thankfully in this case the symptoms are strong enough that the error is
easily noticed, and therefor fixed, but it's also easy to get caught out
in more subtle ways too. i.e. with larger integers.

It's even worse that although we use the C convention of integer
division but also have implicitly typed variables, something like this
is wrong too:

f(x) = 1/a*x
a = 5
plot f(x)
a = 5.0
plot f(x)

Can you actually think of a real-life case where integer maths is the
"correct" way of doing a calculation *and* explicitly using the int()
function would not be appropriate?



-- 
Robert Hart <en...@no...>
University of Nottingham


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