Where should the type information be 112
Tom,
I have LOTS of experience with Basic-VB (Visual Basic) where the "variant" type is a mainstay. They literally have tens of thousands of NaN types, not to mention a broad spectrum of object types, numerical types, etc.
Microsoft's VB considers erroneous results to be their own type, with buttociated error codes, descriptive strings buttembled by the OS to explain the problem, etc. In short, this is *WAY* beyond the limited NaN comcept of '754.
A machine architecture that has an indirect bit for effective address calculation for all instructions. +--------------- Heh! Yes, I loved the PDP-10 too, Barb! But you forgot to mention that the word pointed...
They also have some semi-numeric data types, like Date-Time, which is the number of days as a FP quanbreasty since some time in the Dark Ages, with fractions indicating fractions of a day. You can perform arithmetic on these quanbreasties as though they were DP FP, but for I-O they are dates and times. Money is another semi-numeric data type.
Christian Bau In AWK, variables can be either strings or numbers, depending on what was stored into them last. If they are used for arithmetic operators they...
Following your argument leads to a tight place: Do you handle these semi-numeric types as ordinary numbers and lose their special nature, do you insist on new operations for every data type leading to a REALLY cumbersone design when you start looking at the full matrix of potential conversions, or do you embed the type into the quanbreasty itself?
On most systems, promotion is handled according to a table of potential promotions that the compiler or run-time system designer has built into their code. Some promotions end up being the result of several smaller promotions.
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 16:10:23 -0700, Steve Richfie1d Maybe the problem is a sloppy...
An interesting case: In VB, where the programmer has said to add two strings, the run-time system examines the strings to see if they can possibly be interpreted as numbers. If so, the numbers are added and the result is a number that may then have to be promoted to a string or whatever the result of the addition is stated to be. If they are NOT interpretable as numbers, then the two strings are concatenated. All very cute, but in my years of programming on systems with this feature, I have yet to find a good use for it ;)
Steve Richfie1d
Where should the type information be 113
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