Design Team Issues: Numeric Types

[Michael Lazzaro]

Here are some issues we need the design team to decide.

(A) How shall C-like primitive types be specified, e.g. for binding to/from C library routines, etc?

Option 1: specify as property

my numeric $a is ctype("unsigned long int"); # standard C type
my numeric $b is ctype("my_int32"); # user-defined
my numeric $c is ctype("long double");

my int $a is range(1000..1255) is unchecked; # auto-infer 8bit

Option 2: specify as type

my u_long $a; # standard C type
my long_double $c;

Option 3: ???

(See p6d discussion, "Numeric Types")


(B) Need to know the root of the numeric types

Option 1:
numeric (mostly abstract base class)
- num
- int

Option 2:

num (floating point 'num' is the base class)
- int

Option 3: ???


(C) If C-like primitives are builtin, need to know what their type names/aliases will be, and need to verify whether _ALL_ will have promoted counterparts, e.g. numeric -> Numeric, u_long -> U_Long, etc.

# (TEMPORARY) need final list of numeric types & any aliased names,
# assuming we don't want to support *all* of these names (tho we could)

# the base numeric type

numeric

# signed integers

int
int8 char
int16 short short_int
int32 long long_int
int64 quad long_long long_long_int

# unsigned integers

bit
uint u_int
uint8 u_int8 u_char byte
uint16 u_int16 u_short u_short_int
uint32 u_int32 u_long u_long_int
uint64 u_int64 u_quad u_long_long u_long_long_int

# floating point numbers

num (== double)
float
double
long_double

MikeL