Threw him overboard? That's an irrational response...

2009-02-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

Threw him overboard? That's an irrational response! (har har har, oh puns)

I'd love to see symbolic computations as the default for a mainstream programming language. Software is about abstraction, so it seems reasonable that the default behavior is as abstract and general as possible. If performance suffers, pervasive type inference should be capable of switching to IEEE standard doubles with a single type annotation.

Well...Pythagoras may have been smart, but rumor h...

2009-02-09T12:36:00.000-08:00

Well...Pythagoras may have been smart, but rumor has it that the Pythagoreans killed the guy who proved the existence of irrational numbers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus

In any case, I agree with your idea that bignums should be the default in almost any programming system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic

This was driven home recently when a friend of mine was confused by the results of a floating point calculation. I had to explain IEEE 754, and was thinking that it really does seem like something the average scripter or excel user should not have to learn.

Would be even more fun if we could store all calculations symbolically, and have some kind of mathematical engine behind the scenes. The symbol engine would reduce expressions whenever it could (e.g. sin(pi) => 0), and would create string caches of the approximate values to whatever precision you wanted for display.

That might take a while. :)

Comments on You work for me, Computer: Pythagoras was a smart guy

Threw him overboard? That's an irrational response...

Well...Pythagoras may have been smart, but rumor h...