code not true?

[Michael Hudson]

"Mark Hammond" <mhammond at skippinet.com.au> writes:

> "Grant Edwards" <nobody at nowhere.nohow> wrote in message
> news:M3iM4.518$wJ1.17829 at ptah.visi.com...
> 
> > This seems to be something that we were all told as freshmen
> > but stumble over later anyway.  One wonders if a safe language
> > intended for use by beginners should even have an equality
> > operator for floating point objects.
> 
> Of all the solutions to this problem, this does strike me as one of the
> best - simply remove equality testing al together for floating point:
> 

This is what the latest revision of ML actually does; it doesn't put
real in the "Eq" typeclass (or whatever the ML terminology is).

It's a bit of a broad brush solution, but a reasonable one, IMHO, for
ML.  I don't think Python could get away with it.  Similar to the int
division problem (I'd be quite happy if that blew up).

M.

-- 
58. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid
    it. Geniuses remove it.
     -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/~perlis-alan/quotes.html