From: David A. <dav...@gm...> - 2009-02-26 16:45:10
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Rick McGuire wrote: > This is directed primarily to the project committers. Mike Cowlishaw > has raised the issue that the default digits setting for 64-bit > implementations should remain at 9 digits rather than being raised to > the higher value of 18 that will be used for "numbers used internally > by Rexx". I'm not terribly in favor of this, but I'm not willing to > be the sole person who makes this decision. This new thread is to > discuss whether the change should be made or not. In a couple of > days, I'll submit this to a vote that will decide how to proceed. > > Note that at this stage, there's likely to be some delay on getting > 4.0 out the door caused by this change. The code change itself is > trivial, but we'll need to rework quite a few of the test cases plus > update the docs again. Also, I suspect we're going to need to add a > mechanism that allows a programmer to know when the current digits > setting is different from the internal digits setting and adjust if > needed. Currently, there's no clean way to detect this situation > other than doing something like pass a value to a bif to see if it > rejects it. One thing I was considering for the next release was an > Interpreter class that would be a companion to the RexxContext class. > The Interpreter class would hold the global state of the interpreter, > and things like defaultDigits, internalDigits, etc. are good property > candidates for this class. I have some other long range plans for > this class, but those can deferred to a later release. > > Rick > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA > -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise > -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation > -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD > http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H > _______________________________________________ > Oorexx-devel mailing list > Oor...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oorexx-devel > > While I do not completely disagree with Mike on this issue there are some points I would like to make. 1. I would really like to know how many existing scripts are out there that would be impacted by the larger NUMERIC DIGITS setting for the 64-bit interpreter. I suspect, but have no proof at all, is that we are not talking about a large number. Just how many scripts actually perform numeric intensive operations? And of those, how many will be impacted? Again, I suspect not a large number. 2. A lot of work and a discussion went into this decision. Now is not the time to second guess ourselves. 3. While I am all for the "human readable" features in Rexx, in this case I believe the larger setting in a 64-bit environment is justified. 4. While I don't want to second guess the ANSI standard, it was developed at a time when 64-bit environments were not even on the radar. I believe this was at least a minor factor in setting the standard to 9. Last but not least, I would like to point out that any dependencies a script has on NUMERIC DIGITS being set at 9 can obviously be classified as a BAD programming practice when no check is made to determine the current setting. Rexx code is just like any other source code, it can be copied and reused over and again. Who know where that code will be pasted? And under what setting it will be running? Bad programming is bad programming no matter how it gets created or used. David Ashley |