need real numbers

[paulfitz]

@aw1231 mentions need for reals here: #2 (comment).

[alanfwilliams]

Also, this is needed to facilitate division. I thought about introducing division that leads to whole numbers, however the "/" symbol is already used for creating multiple parentheses (See http://cosmicos.github.io/ Statistics and Structure) Any ideas?

[paulfitz]

Can you just use another symbol, like div? If that's unappealing, I could substitute some other syntax for the role / currently plays - the human-readable symbols are arbitrary in any case.

[alanfwilliams]

div works fine for me. Thanks.

[paulfitz]

@aw1231 I recently freed up the / symbol. So it is available for division if you need it now. Or div is still fine.

[alanfwilliams]

Hi, I'm starting work again on this. But when I run make I get

mypath/transform/cosmicos/Vocab.hx:7: characters 12-45 : Class not found : Map

[paulfitz]

hey @aw1231, what version of haxe are you using? What does haxe -version report?

[alanfwilliams]

haXe Compiler 2.07 - (c)2005-2011 Motion-Twin

[alanfwilliams]

Oh wait...I need at least 3. My bad.

[alanfwilliams]

Ok, now that I got a working build, I'm going to write my ideas about this. Real numbers need to be shown to be "the same" as the number system we currently have. For example:

x=0=0.0

Once that is established, I think it would be good to run it through the normal list of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with equations that will result in non-decimal answers. Then on top of that, we can show how decimals work. Anything else I should add?

[paulfitz]

That sounds like a pretty good start @aw1231!

[alanfwilliams]

Do you think a new file is best for the source? Also, how exactly should I add a new "type" of number into the parsing system?

[paulfitz]

Wow my code needs documentation... I think you'd want to add Floats here https://github.com/paulfitz/cosmicos/blob/master/transform/cosmicos/Evaluate.hx#L28 and you'd want to add a case just before here https://github.com/paulfitz/cosmicos/blob/master/transform/cosmicos/Parse.hx#L145 that checks for a decimal and parses the string as a float if so.

[alanfwilliams]

Will do. Would opening a documentation issue sound ok?

[alanfwilliams]

Question: what style would you like the result to be in? Would 3.2 be ok as:

111.11

,using whatever symbol we decide a decimal to be.
Addendum:
What symbol should a decimal be?

[paulfitz]

+1 for a documentation issue. About how to represent a decimal: the easiest first step is to represent it in the message as something like (. v1 v2) where . is an imagined function that take two integer arguments and returns a float. I'd lean towards a significand/exponent representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point but haven't thought about it very deeply.