On Thursday, 27 November 2014 at 08:31:24 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
I don't think there's such clear separation that can be expressed in a type, it's more in used coding practices rather than type. You can't change coding practice by introducing a new type.
You need to separate and define the old types as well as introducing a clean way to do low level manipulation. How to do the latter is not as clear, but…
…regular types should be constrained to convey the intent of the programmer. The intent is conveyed to the compiler and to readers of the source-code. So the type definition should be strict on whether the intent is to convey monotonic qualities or circular/modular qualities.
The C-practice of casting from void* to char* to float to uint to int in order to do bit manipulation leads to badly structured code. Intrinsics also leads to less readable code. There's got to be a better solution to keep "bit hacks" separate from regular code. Maybe a register type that maps onto SIMD registers…
