Walter Bright wrote:
Lutger wrote:
It's a valid viewpoint, but it is a 'should'. I believe many
programmers have only passing familiarity if at all with the semantics
of unsigned types and floating point operations. At least when coding,
they don't have these semantics in mind. Why do you think Java doesn't
have unsigned types?
Naive programmers have trouble with Java floating point as well:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
There's just no getting around it. Should Java just remove floating
point types as well?
Heck, I knew a degree'd mechanical engineer who could not understand why
his calculator kept giving him answers off by a factor of 2 (he refused
to understand roundoff error, no matter how many times I tried to
explain it to him - he believed that calculators had mathematically
perfect arithmetic).
How could he refuse? One of my favorite games with calculators was to
successively extract square root of 2 until I got 1. The better the
calculator, the more steps it takes. That's kind of difficult to refuse
to acknowledge :o).
Andrei
