
A Numeric Type for Go? - paedubucher
When programmers complain about the lack of generics in Go, a common mitigation
proposed is to use a interface. In many cases, it&#x27;s possible to find an
operation common to all the types to be supported; in the worst case, an empty
interface can be used.<p>This doesn&#x27;t satisfy many Go programmers, so a proposal for generic types has
been made, containing the contract keyword:<p><pre><code>    contract Ordinal(t T) {
        t &lt; t
    }
</code></pre>
So a contract looks basically like an interface, which doesn&#x27;t require a type
to implement a certain method, but to support the use of certain operations on
it.<p>When I think of operations and types that apply to them in Go, the following
categories come to my mind:<p>1. Equality, expressed by == and !=, which is supported by most Go expressions.
2. +, which adds up numbers and concatenates strings.
3. Other operations for arithmetics and comparison: -, *, &#x2F;, %, &lt;, &gt;, &lt;=, &gt;=.
4. Accessors and qualifiers: . and []<p>Complaints about the lack of generics in Go are often heard from programmers
that want to implement numeric libraries. They basically want a type, which
support the operations of the first three categories, which are basically the
numeric types: integer, floating point and complex numbers.<p>So an abstract &quot;numeric&quot; or &quot;number&quot; type could eliminate a lot of the use
cases for contracts. Is this an option being considered? Or isn&#x27;t there just
any benefit over using the double type for numeric computations?
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sethammons
I would consider asking on /r/golang or the golang-nuts mailing list.

