Fwd: ? Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal

From: Bill Poser (billposer2@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 24 2010 - 20:02:44 CDT

  • Next message: Bill Poser: "Re: ? Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal"

    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    From: Bill Poser <billposer2@gmail.com>
    Date: Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 6:02 PM
    Subject: Re: ? Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal
    To: Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>

    On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
    > On 24 Jul 2010, at 23:00, Bill Poser wrote:
    >
    >> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
    >>
    >>> Digits can be scattered randomly about the code space and it wouldn't make any difference.
    >>
    >> Having written a library for performing conversions between Unicode strings and numbers, I disagree.
    >
    > You can, but in principle it remains true.

    A claim for which you provide not the slightest argument and for
    which, as, I believe, a non-programmer, you have no experience or
    authority. As I said, it isn't a huge issue, but scattering the digits
    makes the programming a bit more complex and error-prone and the
    programs a little less efficient. To provide a simple example, if you
    want to check whether a character is a numeral in such-and-such a
    numeral system, it is simpler and less error prone, and many
    situations also more efficient at the machine level, to test something
    like:

    if (( c >= DIGIT0) && (c <= DIGIT9))

    than to test whether c is one of ten scattered code points.



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