Re: Numeric Literals (Summary 2)

On Sunday, November 24, 2002, at 04:16  AM, Richard J Cox wrote:
> We could adopt the C99 version and use "p" or "P" for hex decimal 
> values (this, reportedly, allows certain values not expressible in 
> decimal for floats to be specified).
> Thus
>     0x.4Ap10
>     0xA.BCDp-15
>
> (The exponent cannot be in hex in C99).
>
> However this clearly cannot generalise for all bases <= 36...

Hmm, that's not overpoweringly ugly.  Looks nice, even.  The fact that 
it doesn't generalize is a little awkward.

I'm still thinking that, unless someone comes up with a really 
compelling real-world reason to *have* floats in bases other than 10, 
we shouldn't ask the design team to add it to the language.  It 
certainly wouldn't be missed by 99.999% of the population.

It will be easy enough to add as a grammar munge later, for the elite 
set of sixteen-fingered people who find working in base 10 
floating-point disdainful.  :-)

(Ooooh, there's another idea we _SHOULDN'T_ pursue... adding postfix 
'%' to mean 'percent', but in any radix.  So 0x80% of 0x10 would be 
0x08 !)

MikeL