Take a look at the capabilities of the mpfr library. In the long run, it 
might be good to be able to switch between the boxed float primitive of 
squeak/pharo, and the extended capabilities of the external lib: 
http://www.mpfr.org/ and the capabilities of mpfr might be a good 
guideline for what an extended floating point class should be able to do.


Lawson




On 5/22/12 3:53 PM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:
> Here is a set of experimental classes for controlling floating point
> output format.
> The ideas are:
> - 1) we can extend these formatting capabilities without creating a
> bunch of new messages combinations
>        instead, we just have parameterized FloatPrinter object (+
> subclasses), and use cascade of elementary messages
>        The capabilities are right now limited to scientific, free
> format, fixed point and storeOn: format.
>        But features are growable, and we could as well control
> localization, thousand separators, padding (total width, width left of
> fraction point, force + sign, etc...)
> - 2) The complex algorithm for printing accurately
> (Burger/Dybvig/Steele) has been split into private methods in order to
> be reusable by various format (fixed number of decimal places and
> fixed number of significand digits)
>        I choosed to store above algorithm internal states in inst var
> in order to avoid explosion of meaningless parameters...
>        This turns the functional implementation into a stateful
> implementation, but encapsulated in a class and private messages...
>        It's a bit the same design choice as SqNumberParser.
>        Having more comments is also a benefit (it's still preferable to
> read the paper though)
>
> The good news is that, despite parametrization and FloatPrinter
> instantiation, slow down is typically limited to 3% (we can optimize
> the default case eventually)...
>
> Comments, extensions and alternate design are welcome.
>
> Nicolas
>
>


-- 
Squeak from the very start (introduction to Squeak and Pharo Smalltalk for the (almost) complete and compleate beginner).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6601A198DF14788D&feature=view_all

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