9 ms·
It brought one of my favorite parts about writing numbers in languages such as Ruby over to Go. From 10000000 to 10_000_000 is such a readability improvement an
by skunkworker 7y ago
It brought one of my favorite parts about writing numbers in languages such as Ruby over to Go. From 10000000 to 10_000_000 is such a readability improvement and should be no-cost.
- paulddraper 7y agoUnderscores are nice. 10 * 1000 * 1000 worked pretty well too.
- derefr 7y agoCompile-time integer exponentiation in Go would be neat, e.g. 5 ＊ (1000＊＊4). I know we have scientific-notation integer literals, but it's not the same thing, especially when trying to calculate e.g. Mebibytes.
- pkaye 7y agoIn go you can use scientific notation for integers var x int = 1e9
- big_chungus 7y agoNot sure about go, but you can do this in C as a compile-time constant: #define foo 1.34E8 Maybe go would benefit from a pre-processor? Though it can be somewhat byzantine in C (and result in very unpredictable final source, if abused), it's very helpful to have a complete functional language available for code transformation. It might help go in some cases, too.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoYou say that, but I find that a lot harder to read (and using `e` notation) than just the number - and readability / clarity is more important than cleverness, especially in Go. 10_000_000 can be read, 5 ＊ (1000＊＊4) and 1e7 has to be decoded. By me anyway, I'm just an average developer that never did well in maths - and you have to write code for the average developer, not for yourself and not for the top 10% smartest people.
- JNRowe 7y agoWhile I too like the change, there can be a user cost. For example, it makes using grep across a project slightly more annoying. Much like the flexible identifier rules in nim, it feels great but using common tools suddenly needs more thought.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoWould it make sense to have an editor display a number in a more readable fashion while the source code itself has the grep-able version? I'm not a fan of ligatures myself but that is also done purely as presentation logic.
- mseepgood 7y ago> From 10000000 to 10_000_000 is such a readability improvement and should be no-cost. 1e7
- lacampbell 7y agoMysterious hacker news downvoting! This my preferred way of writing numbers with lots of 0s as well.
- rbonvall 7y agoBut underscores also work for numbers that don't have lot of zeros. Compare: 12_345_678 1.2345678e7
- lacampbell 7y agogood point. Kind of realising how much of my daily work could use bytes as the main numeric type
- masklinn 7y ago> 1e7 Is a float literal.
- majewsky 7y agoNot in Go. Number literals don't have a type until they're assigned to a variable or used in a place that implies a type (e.g. a function argument). For example, the following is valid: var u uint32 = 10000000000.0 / 100000 even though 10000000000 overflows uint32 and it's also written like a floating-point literal.
- masklinn 7y ago> Not in Go. Yes in go. `var u = 1e7` gives a float. That means 1e7 is a float literal. You can coerce it to an integer by explicitly typing the target, but it's still a float literal.
- cjensen 7y agoYou guys are going to make me cry again that C++ rejected using underscores in favor of... single-quote. O_o
- patrec 7y agoOnly someone with no typographic taste whatsoever would prefer 10_000 over 10'000, so personally I'll rather cry about only C++ getting this right.
- rebolek 7y agoNot only C++. Rebol and Red also get this right. And they also allow comma instead of a dot as a decimal separator, oh the horror!