On Sat, 2002-11-16 at 07:37, Michael Lazzaro wrote: > Due to ambiguities, the proposal to allow floating point in bases other > than 10 is therefore squished. If anyone still wants it, we can ask > the design team to provide a final ruling.
Why are we so hung up on spelling floating-point literals with "E"? What about a completely generic number format like: [radix:]whole-part[:fractional-part[:exponent[:exponent-radix[:options]]]] where whole-part, fractional-part and exponent can each include a sign and can each use dotted-digit notation, provided that radix is present, and radix and exponent-radix are written in base-ten. The only useful option I can think of so far is "loose", meaning that digits can be larger than the radix. I would suggest that exponent-radix should default to the same as radix. So 10:1.2.3:4.5:6 == 123450000 2:1:1:1110 == 0x6000 60:22.0.-27::-2 == 21.9925 Although now that I look at it, I can't see a lot of point in having both a fractional part *and* an exponent. -Martin
