On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:

On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, Eliot Miranda wrote:

Hi Levente,

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:
On Wed, 6 Aug 2014, Eliot Miranda wrote:

Hi All,
Squeak trunk also suffers from the Float parsed as a Fraction bug:

1e-8 class Fraction
1.0e8 class Float

I'm not entirely sure about it being a bug. I've checked Squeak 3.8 (pre-SqNumberParser), and it also parsed that literal as a Fraction. If I want a Float, I can be explicit and use 1.0e-8.

IMO it very much *is* a bug. Smalltalk-80 has never supported Fraction literals. They're always written as division expressions. Fraction answers false to isLiteral. Just because it worked that way
doesn't mean it was right. I suspect no one noticed. Allowing Fraction literals feels like a big change to me.

It's more like undefined behavior than a bug IMHO, though the lack of #isLiteral makes me think that the Fractions are not intentional. Interesting how Nicolas's SqNumberParser behaves the same way as the previous number parser in this case.

I made a modified version of Fraction >> #printOn:base: which outputs the literal format if possible. The change "fixes" the debugger (note that itw was way less broken in Squeak than in Pharo
anyway).
The only drawback I found is that some fractions become a bit more "complex" when printed, e.g. 3/4 => 75e-2

OK, but is this the right fix? What does everybody think? Keep the language unchanged or add Fraction literals and add another incompatibility with other dialects?

I don't think that anyone ever used this "feature" before, so doing what other dialects do is probably the best way to resolve this.

Agreed. Smalltalk-80 v2 had no literal fractions. ObjectWorks and VisualWorks have never had literal fractions. I can't speak for other dialects, but I'm fairly sure none of the Smalltalk/V, Team/V lineage had literal Fractions either.

If Fractions are literals
- what is the semantics of 1/0 (easy, it is not a literal, but needs to be stated)?
- what is [1/0.1] on: ZeroDivide do: [:ex| #error] ? Is it 10.0 or #error, i.e. is 1/0.1 10.0 or 1 / 0 followed by the Integer 1?

I did not propose to make all fractions literals. My implementation simply prints decimal fractions with the exponent notation, e.g. 3/4 is printed as 75-e2, but 2/3 is still printed as (2/3).

Levente

Levente
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eek! Eliot

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best,Eliot

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best,

Eliot