18 Oct
2011
18 Oct
'11
5:46 a.m.
From: David Cantrell <david at cantrell.org.uk>
I wish there was a widely available, widely known
general purpose
programming language which had a "number with precision" type, which
would Do The Right Thing when doing things like multiplying values
together - ie, decreasing the precision - and would let you specify a
required minimum precision for results or function parameters, with
exceptions being thrown if those can't be achieved. It would be nice to
be able to automate away the problem of "measure with a micrometer, mark
with chalk, cut with an axe".
I am almost certain Ada 95 provides this. You can certainly specify the
number of digits of precison and create your own type or subtype and I
believe the runtime automatically protects you from loss of precision.
The only thing is because of the rigid typing it's hard to move data around
unless everything is the same type.