Re: Proposal: Arbitrary precision native scalar type

On Tue, Dec 12, 2023, at 1:03 PM, G. P. B. wrote: > The issue is that I don't think having arbitrary precision decimals as a > core language feature is a necessity compared to rational types. > A cast from rational to float wouldn't produce a large round trip, whereas > trying to figure out arbitrary precision is more difficult. > But in any case, having a declare/INI or whatever that changes the > behaviour of the engine/language is not a good design choice. I don't have strong feelings about arbitrary precision decimals either way, but I do strongly agree with this point. Having the language behavior (including the precision of numbers) change with an ini setting is long-understood to be a bad idea, and we've been trying to phase it out. A decimal feature that relies on a language-affecting ini setting is just not going to fly these days, IMO, and rightly so. I am curious, GB, if you're proposing an actual rational type, which stores values internally as just numerator and denominator separately until some point when it renders down to a float (eg, on print)? That sounds neat, though I am nowhere near expert enough in that area to say what ugly edge cases that might run into. --Larry Garfield