Exponents of numbers

Bert Freudenberg bert at impara.de
Thu Sep 15 12:45:35 UTC 2005


Am 15.09.2005 um 10:14 schrieb Andreas Raab:

> Hi -
>
> I just got horribly bitten by the fact that 16r1d4 is being parsed  
> as 65536 (yes, it really does). Looking at the methods in question  
> it appears that Number class>>canParseExponentFor:base:from: acceps  
> *all* of e, d, or q as exponent indicator.
>
> Why??? This seems completely superfluous and causes actual harm if  
> you happen to misspell a hex constant.

Well, the obvious choice is e which still would be a hex digit. The  
Blue Book only has e, btw.

I had a conversation with Dan once about Smalltalk's syntax for  
literal numbers and he was quite proud of the purely syntactical  
rules enabled by distinguishing upper and lower case.

- Bert -




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