Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
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?
Beats me. Naturally, I lost all respect for his engineering prowess.
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
