[ENH] Case independent numbers

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Mar 1 11:44:38 UTC 2000


Bert Freudenberg <bert at isgnw.CS.Uni-Magdeburg.De> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent) wrote:
> 
> > > >I wrote:
> > > >who of you really would expect that 16r1e5 equals 1048576 while 16r1E5 is
> > > >485? If not too many, I propose to make hex numbers case independent, and
> > > >exponent notation, too. 
> > > 
> > > Dan wrote:
> > > I have a problem with this, Bert.
> > > The way it is, there is a simple syntactic rule for numbers.
> > > Your changes imply a rule that is not syntactic, but value-dependent:
> > > 
> > > 16r1E5 = 485, but
> > > 14r1E5 = 537824


By the way, the standard seems to suggest that uppercase letters are to
be used, and that the base should only go up to 36.  (section 3.5.6) 
Lowercase 'e' is used to designate the exponent of a floating point
number (as are 'd' and 'q').  It is illegal to specify an exponent for
what is otherwise an integer--eg, 10e10 is illegal, while 10.0e10 is
legal.

Anyway, if anyone is planning to go through cleaning this stuff up,
maybe they should make it fit the standard.


Lex





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list