From: Bill Poser (billposer2@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 24 2010 - 20:02:44 CDT
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Poser <billposer2@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 6:02 PM
Subject: Re: ? Reasonable to propose stability policy on numeric type = decimal
To: Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>
On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:25 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
> On 24 Jul 2010, at 23:00, Bill Poser wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Digits can be scattered randomly about the code space and it wouldn't make any difference.
>>
>> Having written a library for performing conversions between Unicode strings and numbers, I disagree.
>
> You can, but in principle it remains true.
A claim for which you provide not the slightest argument and for
which, as, I believe, a non-programmer, you have no experience or
authority. As I said, it isn't a huge issue, but scattering the digits
makes the programming a bit more complex and error-prone and the
programs a little less efficient. To provide a simple example, if you
want to check whether a character is a numeral in such-and-such a
numeral system, it is simpler and less error prone, and many
situations also more efficient at the machine level, to test something
like:
if (( c >= DIGIT0) && (c <= DIGIT9))
than to test whether c is one of ten scattered code points.
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