Re: Plans for gnuplot version 5

[Tait <gnu...@t4...>]

This just occurred to me. One thing that hangs up more new users than
anything else is that these days everyone assumes automatic promotion
of numeric types. And to a lesser degree, on-demand infinite-precision
math, but that's another topic. The question of why "1/2" is zero
instead of a half misleads more than a few users into believing that
gnuplot is fundamentally broken. They don't know or understand the
underlying data types or their limitations, so these seem like arcane
gotchas when everything else they've ever used does the promotion
transparently.

I don't think we're supporting any systems or OSes without an FPU
anymore, right? And memory or CPU are not nearly the limitations they
once were (at that level). Maybe v5 is the time gnuplot should stop
treating integer-looking numbers like integers unless requested
explicitly via int()?