[swift-evolution] Thoughts on clarity of Double and Float type names?

[Ben Rimmington]

> On 20 Jun 2016, at 15:44, Stephen Canon <scanon at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> At some danger of going off on a tangent, I should point out that DEC64 has very little to recommend it.  It’s not much more efficient performance-wise than IEEE-754 decimal types and has significantly less exponent range (it effectively throws away almost three bits in order to have the exponent fit in a byte; 2**56 is ~7.2E16, which means that it can represent some, but not all, 17-digit significands; the effective working precision is 16 digits, which actually requires only ~53.15 bits.  Even if you weren’t going to use those extra bits for exponent, they could be profitably used for other purposes.  The fact that the dec-64 scheme allows one to use byte operations has only a tiny benefit, and really only on x86).

Fair enough, I just thought the idea of a single number type was interesting.

As for the proposal, there's a FIXME comment which suggests the original plan:

<https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/stdlib/public/core/Policy.swift>

	//===----------------------------------------------------------------------===//
	// Aliases for floating point types
	//===----------------------------------------------------------------------===//
	// FIXME: it should be the other way round, Float = Float32, Double = Float64,
	// but the type checker loses sugar currently, and ends up displaying 'FloatXX'
	// in diagnostics.
	/// A 32-bit floating point type.
	public typealias Float32 = Float
	/// A 64-bit floating point type.
	public typealias Float64 = Double

I think CFloat and CDouble are clearer, so Float and Double could be made unavailable:

	@available(*, unavailable, renamed: "Float32")
	public typealias Float = Float32

	@available(*, unavailable, renamed: "Float64")
	public typealias Double = Float64

Clang importer already seems to be using the correct names:

<https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/include/swift/ClangImporter/BuiltinMappedTypes.def>
<https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/lib/ClangImporter/MappedTypes.def>

-- Ben