2011/4/8 Marcus Denker <marcus.denker@inria.fr>:
On Apr 8, 2011, at 7:48 PM, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
Well, whatever the underneath representation, one can expect roundedTo: 2 to return a float with two decimals.
Sometimes I think we should use the resources that these amazing machines give us these days to move programming languages closer to humans...
There are better Float models than the ones that are implemented in hardware. E.g. another INRIA Project is this GNU MPFR:
"The MPFR library is a C library for multiple-precision floating-point computations with correct rounding."
    http://www.mpfr.org/
Why don't we make our language better at "real" math? The power in the machine is definitly there... I am quite convincd that if there are normal programming languages in 50 years, the math part of them will be closer to Mathematica then to C...
    Marcus
mpfr are still floating point with inexact operations, you just change the precision to whatever number of bits you want. I played with my own modest Smalltalk implementation relying on LargeInteger arithmetic http://www.squeaksource.com/ArbitraryPrecisionFl.html It implements correct rounding to (if correct is round to nearest even). Nicolas
-- Marcus Denker  -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.