On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]> wrote: > <snip> > > Okay. So now this brings us back to the question, which is: should the > operators be distinguished? If so, then we would probably need > distinct algorithm statements for the two families of matrix > operations. > > On the other hand, it helps that we do not do any implicit casts, > which means that these operations cannot be mixed in ill-advised ways. > Given that the optimizer will not be confused after all, it may be > sufficient to assert that people who use floating point arithmetic in > gross ignorance have already given up any reasonable expectation of a > comprehensible result. > > I really don't like breaking with tradition on this, but for the first > time I see a credible story for why doing so might make sense. > > Opinions?
I'm strongly in favor of + for both. I've written numerical code in ocaml, and +. is a minor but significant irritant both to write and to read. I would actually go so far as to say that it's one of my biggest complaints about ocaml, other than lack of packed storage, etc. (I spend a lot of time writing numerical formulas). If you are trying to verify that a given numerical calculation is correct, you are going to spend the first half second realizing it is in floating point and the next several hours analyzing all the possible singularities looking for precision loss, so making the second part easier on the eyes is important. Geoffrey _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
