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Re: Interesting Rant [message #51371 is a reply to message #51314]

Thu, 16 November 2006 01:51

Nigel Wade
Messages: 286
Registered: March 1998

Senior Member

Francis Burton wrote:

> In article <1163605646.246847.326220@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> Braedley <mike.braedley@gmail.com> wrote:
>> His comments about the 7/2 by themselves tell me that he doesn't know
>> jack about programming.

It's not just that example which show his general ignorance. Apparently he's a
CS major who has never bothered to learn anything about actually programming
and using computers.

>> I know for sure that at least 2 of the 4
>> competing languages (the C family, Java and possibly Maltab) all do the
>> exact same thing as IDL. EXACT! (Okay, maybe Matlab doesn't, I
>> haven't used it in 8 months.) The fourth is Maple, and it may still do

Every language which provides integer arithmetic does this. It's a fact of life
of integer arithmetic. That the author of that rant doesn't know this only
demonstrated his ignorance, it does not show a fault in any of those languages.
The author would probably be equally surprised and annoyed by the loss of
precision in floating point and have a rant at other languages because they
can't do simple arithmetic correctly.

>
> In MATLAB, both 7/2 and 7/2. evaluate to 3.5 (displayed as
> 3.5000 by default).

MATLAB defaults to using double precision for all variables. As a corollary to
the IDL "problem" of 7/2, try the same integer calculation in MATLAB to see how
useful the opposite camp can be:

>> int16(7)/int16(2)

That one rather annoyed me when MATLAB first introduced non-double matrices.
After I spent several days reprogramming a MATLAB to C interface so it returned
integer matrices for integer data I discovered just how comprehensive their
support of non-double data types was.

For those of you who don't have access to MATLAB, the result of the MATLAB
integer division is:

??? Error using ==> /
Function '/' is not defined for values of class 'int16'.

I wonder how much that would annoy our CS major ranter?

--
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@ion.le.ac.uk
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555

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[Message index]

		Interesting Rant By: David Fanning on Tue, 14 November 2006 09:40
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Nigel Wade on Fri, 17 November 2006 05:00
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Steve Eddins on Thu, 16 November 2006 17:00
		Re: Interesting Rant By: greg michael on Thu, 16 November 2006 09:35
		Re: Interesting Rant By: JD Smith on Fri, 17 November 2006 11:44
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Nigel Wade on Thu, 16 November 2006 01:51
		Re: Interesting Rant By: James Kuyper on Wed, 15 November 2006 15:55
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Mike[2] on Wed, 15 November 2006 13:21
		Re: Interesting Rant By: news.qwest.net on Wed, 15 November 2006 11:36
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Foldy Lajos on Wed, 15 November 2006 12:38
		Re: Interesting Rant By: gknoke on Wed, 15 November 2006 12:13
		Re: Interesting Rant By: Richard Edgar on Wed, 15 November 2006 10:31

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