Re: [q-lang-users] Q 7.2 RC 1 issue 1: Nomenclature

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

John Cowan wrote:
> I am not happy with the names of the syntactic vs. semantic number
> predicates.  Currently it is isint, isrational, isreal, etc. for syntactic
> (representation) predicates, and isintnum, isratnum, iscompnum etc. for
> semantic (value) predicates.  This is intended to be consistent with
> isbool, isfile, islist etc., which are syntactic; however, it is only
> with numbers that this dichotomy between syntactic and semantic types
> is really necessary.

I can understand your issues, but swapping the names of the semantic and 
the syntactic predicates will even create more confusion (unless I also 
change the type names, of course, but I'm not inclined to do so).

So we'll have to change the name of the semantic predicates then. Any 
suggestions? How about intp, rationalp, realp, complexp? Looks familiar 
to Lisp programmers, non-Lispers will surely hate it, but it is short 
and at least reminiscent of the Scheme functions.

> (By the way, does Q use any sort of fixed-width integer representation
> internally, or are all integers in GMP format internally?  I'm just
> curious.)

GMP everywhere, there are no machine integers in Q. :)

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