C trivia - was Re: Dennis Ritchie has died

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 09:46:41PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: Yes it does. The underlying problem is almost never "achieve perfection" but is "get a result accurate enough to let me build this bridge and have it not fall down" or "make the code work fast enough". The tricky bit is that once you've got a good enough approximation for, eg, sqrt(2), which you then use, to bear in mind that the result is an approximation, and that if you then perform some other operation with that result and with another approximation that the errors grow, and grow, and grow, and then DOOM. 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". -- David Cantrell | semi-evolved ape-thing You can't spell AWESOME without ME!