NICE-ESG-Libs Digest Wed, 14 Jun 95 Volume 1 : Issue 264
Today's Topics:
^ operator
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Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 10:24:25 +0100 (BST)
From: S M Fisher <S.M.Fisher@letterbox.rl.ac.uk>
Subject: ^ operator
To: NICE ESG Library Committee
Hi,
Am I right in saying that the only person in favour of the PELKS ^
signature is Bertrand?
Clearly (as I already indicated in Digest 219) integer exponents are the
more general case and so must be tied to the ^. The only argument against
this, is that of Paul Dubois who very reasonably wants to be able to use
real exponents with real numbers. However as real numbers are NUMERIC why
not simply redefine ^ for REAL and for DOUBLE - or am I missing something?
There have been suggestions that this might be inefficient. For my work, I
would use mostly REAL^REAL then SQUARE_MATRIX^INTEGER and last
INTEGER^INTEGER. The reason that INTEGER^INTEGER would be rare is that for
the common cases where the exponent is a small integer I would tend to use
multiplication (as a FORTRAN progarmmer obsessed by efficiency), i.e I
would write i*i rather than i^2.
Steve F
P.S. I apologise for failing to sign my last posting about procedures.
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