I think you're assuming people's beliefs about programming languages are simpler to modify than they've proven to be in our experience.
Here's an experiment you could try to see if I'm right: over the course of six months, reply to every e-mail you see on julia-users that derives from a misunderstanding of the manual. My hypothesis is that you'll find very early on in your experiment that short notes in the manual are almost never sufficient to prevent confusion. For example, there are many different notes in the manual about why you shouldn't do any programming in the global scope, but we get e-mails about performance in the global scope at least once a week from users that haven't understood that section of the manual. I contend that the name Float would have a similar effect. -- John On Jul 29, 2014, at 4:24 PM, Júlio Hoffimann <julio.hoffim...@gmail.com> wrote: > If only Float exists in Julia, then there is no door for confusion with > Double. A user coming from a C background will soon notice that Float is the > type he is looking for. Furthermore, a simple short note on the manual is > enough to make it even clearer. > > Júlio.
