

Ceylon: True advance, or just another language? - markokocic
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ceylon/index.html

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ggchappell
This is interesting (under "Ceylon types"):

> Decimal. Arbitrary precision and arbitrary scale decimals

And then nothing more is said about them. But they raise all kinds of
interesting issues. Obviously someone has thought about them; e.g., the name
"Decimal" (as opposed to "Real") says you can't store, say, 1/3 exactly, let
alone something like sqrt(2) or pi. But apparently 10^k, for just about any
integral k, will produce an exact result. Not so for 2^k, though (rather un-
computerish, no)?

I'd like to find out more about these. Does anyone have any links or info?

P.S. What would be really fun is some kind of lazily-evaluated arbitrary-
precision value. Only compute as many digits as are needed at the moment. Can
we also toss in a representation that could specify any rational exactly?

~~~
chalst
I haven't seen anything more explicit than the _Introduction to Ceylon_ blog
posts, where Gavin does mention that only the natural and float types are
built-in.

It's not actually clear to me that the Decimal type is base-10. The word
decimal is fairly often (mis)used to mean number representations with a
decimal point.

