3 ms·

It's not so much that floating point needs to be boxed as that all-too-many languages allow smooth (read "sloppy") casting from float to int and back, often wit

It's not so much that floating point needs to be boxed as that all-too-many languages allow smooth (read "sloppy") casting from float to int and back, often with semantics that are unclear to the developer and require esoteric memorization. In 5 seconds or less, can you say whether 1.0/4 will be 0.25 or 0 for every language you use regularly? Most developers can't, and most languages make statements like that trivial (and worse, it far more often shows up as "x/y" for x and y of types that need to be looked up to know what the evaluated type will be). There's a reason C++, for example, has the MISRA rules about avoiding implicit coercions (because even though what happens is [generally] well-defined, enough code in the wild has been broken for developers mis-remembering or mis-applying the rules that explicit casts are highly recommended for high-reliability code).

sfpotter 3y ago
OK, I get the point you’re trying to make now. The languages I work with most often in decreasing order of frequency are: C, Python, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, and Julia. I don’t regularly cause problems for myself by running afoul of implicit casting rules, but I also spend all day writing numerical software. I can see that it can cause problems for other people who don’t spend as much time dealing with IEEE754. There are definitely days where I feel like an OCaml-like level of casting pedantry would be nice, and other days I feel like it would be exhausting and make my code harder to read. I’ve never written a big piece of code in a language that required explicit casts for everything. I’m open to it. I would say that unsigned integers cause me the most problems of any numeric type, but not so many problems that I’m looking to change languages. If I worked in a different field it’d be a different story I’m sure.
sfpotter 3y ago
By the way, I had a chance to check: and I was right with my guess. All six of those languages evaluate 1.0/4 to 0.25, exactly as expected. It might have taken me 30 seconds or so to form my answer ;-) but that time was mostly spent parsing your question. What languages don't evaluate 1.0/4 to 0.25? I checked OCaml (exception), node (0.25), Lua (0.25), Swift (0.25), sbcl (0.25), ... and then I got bored. To me the expected behavior should be something like: for a binop between a float and an int, promote the int to float and do the floating point operation. Obviously there are corner cases here...

sfpotter 3y ago

OK, I get the point you’re trying to make now. The languages I work with most often in decreasing order of frequency are: C, Python, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, and Julia. I don’t regularly cause problems for myself by running afoul of implicit casting rules, but I also spend all day writing numerical software. I can see that it can cause problems for other people who don’t spend as much time dealing with IEEE754. There are definitely days where I feel like an OCaml-like level of casting pedantry would be nice, and other days I feel like it would be exhausting and make my code harder to read. I’ve never written a big piece of code in a language that required explicit casts for everything. I’m open to it. I would say that unsigned integers cause me the most problems of any numeric type, but not so many problems that I’m looking to change languages. If I worked in a different field it’d be a different story I’m sure.

sfpotter 3y ago

By the way, I had a chance to check: and I was right with my guess. All six of those languages evaluate 1.0/4 to 0.25, exactly as expected. It might have taken me 30 seconds or so to form my answer ;-) but that time was mostly spent parsing your question. What languages don't evaluate 1.0/4 to 0.25? I checked OCaml (exception), node (0.25), Lua (0.25), Swift (0.25), sbcl (0.25), ... and then I got bored. To me the expected behavior should be something like: for a binop between a float and an int, promote the int to float and do the floating point operation. Obviously there are corner cases here...