Re: Motion P1788/M0044:Constructors -- Voting Period begins
The motion seems to be no more than changing the cross reference to the
new location.
I vote YES.
However, I would prefer that 1788 remove entirely text2interval... given
that such issues
as decimal-to-binary conversion, parsing and evaluation of exact
arithmetic quotients,
values for pi (etc), are either routine parts of programming languages,
or in their libraries.
And to cap it off, this complicated and unnecessary part is (at least in
the current motion) OPTIONAL.
My view is that the host programming language must be adequate to create
any literal number
which is the inf or sup value stored in a bare interval, and to create
from any bare interval
the two numbers which are its inf and sup values (including infinity,
NaN). If this is the
case, there is no need for text2interval. If this is NOT the case,
the language is essentially
unsuitable for interval arithmetic. (A clever enough person could still
build interval
arithmetic out of character strings or some other hacks, but I would
call this evidence of
unsuitability...)
Furthermore, text2interval violates what would seem to be a fundamental
rule of "good hygiene".
That is it admits of notation like 0.1 which is close, but not the same,
in meaning as 0.1 in the programming
language.
Richard Fateman