Gregory, others:
> Division is very much math and has significant implications on
> precision.
Uhm… yeah, division is math; that much is not lost on an R&D engineer.
What I mean is that “in the final analysis” (what {val} *does* for
delimiting numbers), is that no math services are performed for the
editor/user as there is with conversion templates. This is all about
inserting span gaps every third character. What the template user does
is input the value and {val} inserts spaces. This entire {val}-like
function can be handled with string functions acting on the signficand
as if they are just simple characters, numeric, Latin, Roman, Martian;
it doesn’t matter.
> There exist plenty of such string functions. Every proper programming
> language provides them. The parser functions, however, do not.
Bingo.
[[User:Greg L]]
On Feb 11, 2009, at 11:43 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:17 PM, greg_l_at_wikipedia
<greg_l_at_wikipe...@comcast.net> wrote:
[snip]
> In the final analysis, no real "math" is performed on these
> significands;
> all that is happening is delimiters (either a comma or a <span> gap)
Division is very much math and has significant implications on
precision.
You might think that by dividing only in powers of 10 you are avoiding
precision problems, but you would be wrong because the computer isn't
doing math in base 10.
> are being applied every three characters until there is only two,
> three,
> or four characters left. I am still rather surprised that there aren't
> some
> simple, bug-free string functions that could tackle this task. This
> would
> allow significands of unlimited length.
There exist plenty of such string functions. Every proper programming
language provides them. The parser functions, however, do not.
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