Re: [pure-lang-users] Numeric Arguments

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Libor Spacek wrote:
> The idea is that all the current numeric types become transparent (hidden) to the user.

As Eddie already pointed out, that's the idea behind Scheme's numeric
tower; that's probably as far as you can go to alleviate the
complexities of the numeric tower before hitting the wall of
computational complexity.

I've already explained in another thread why Pure doesn't follow
Scheme's scheme in order to achieve its goals, so I won't rehash this
discussion here. In any case Pure makes it easy to write polymorphic
functions which work with all numeric types without a big runtime
penalty, and also makes it easy to distinguish them when it's necessary.

There are a few inconveniences where you have to use explicit
conversions to tell the interpreter which kind of result you actually
want, but I think that they're relatively minor. YMMV. But at least Pure
allows you to add your own equations to existing operations to patch
them up the way you want them, like you did with the mod operation.

> The beauty of this scheme is that you could then get away with having just ::number type and nothing else and use only one common code for any calculations, instead of the current, frankly, mess.

Yeah, one can dream. But there's always the tradeoff between speed and
convenience, that's why we still need machine ints and floating point
numbers. "If you can't make it both fast and correct, make it fast." ;-)

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag