[Jscheme-devel] Numeric Literals and Widening/Narrowing

[Timothy H. <tim...@ma...>]

We have removed the partial attempt we had made at adding automatic
narrowing and widenning for numeric types in the dynamic dispatch of 
jscheme.
The goal was to make it easy to use methods and fields whose types are 
numeric
values that are not the default types (integer or double).

We have opted instead to introduce new syntax for numeric literals so 
that
bytes, shorts, ints, longs, floats, and doubles can all be expressed 
directly as literals and
can be distinguished by their printed form. Thus the following is now 
legal Jscheme:

   > (Byte. 5b)
    5B
   > (Byte. 5B)
     5B

   > (Short. 7s)
    7S
   > (Short. 7S)
    7S

  > (Integer. 12)
   12

   > (Long. 4L)
   4L
  > (Long. 4l)
   4L

   > (Float. 5F)
   5.0F
   > (Float. 5f)
   5.0F

  > (Double 9.0)
   9.0

Currently the arithmetic operators follow the java model and convert 
floats to doubles
and bytes and shorts to ints before doing any arithmetic. Thus you must 
use
(.byteValue N)  (.shortValue N) or (.floatValue N) expressions of 
Numeric type
to return values of type  byte,short, or float .


---Tim---