[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0067: Enhanced Floating Point Protocols

[David Sweeris]

> On Apr 22, 2016, at 9:56 AM, Stephen Canon via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 22, 2016, at 10:54 AM, Xiaodi Wu <xiaodi.wu at gmail.com <mailto:xiaodi.wu at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Naive question: is it necessary to make a trade-off here? Why not an
>> associated type Exponent that's Int for Float, Double, and Float80,
>> allowing for something else for bignums?
> 
> It’s an added (fairly minor) complexity to the API surface that confers approximately zero benefit.
> 

So you admit the benefit isn’t *actually* zero? :-)

Yes, it does add a small bit of complexity to the API’s surface, but it's on a part of the surface that I don’t think people look at very much. How often are people extracting a float’s exponent? Plus, I suspect there’s a fair bit of overlap between the group of people who even know what `.exponent` would get used for, and those who’d get a warm fuzzy feeling from seeing that the standard library has baked-in, low-level support for bignum / arbitrary precision types.

Embrace the warm fuzzies… make exponent be an associated type.

- Dave Sweeris (who, despite the light-hearted tone, thinks this is actually pretty important)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20160422/5bf98f15/attachment.html>