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Postings from October 2008
Patrick R. Michaud wrote: > Correct. I suspect that eventually the Rakudo developers will have > to develop a custom set of PMCs for Perl 6 behaviors rather than > relying on the Parrot ones. I think it would be better for things like unlimited-precision integers and rationals to be Parrot generic PMCs rather than Perl 6 specific ones, since there are other languages that also have unlimited-precision numbers (for example Python afaik) and it would be better to have a common implementation. Several popular languages have unlimiteds now, and more are coming over time. Note that just as integers are naturally radix independent, the unlimited rationals should be too, and the latter can compactly represent all rationals as a triple of integers corresponding roughly to a (normalized) [mantissa, radix, exponent] triple; with that approach you also get unlimited floats for free, so no reason to make floats an exception where they aren't unlimited where integers and other rationals are; after all, what is a float or scientific notation than just another notation for a rational value literal. -- Darren Duncan