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At 09:50 AM 8/6/2002 -0700, Jeff Lowery wrote:
>In order to validate a universal type, a constraint system would have to be
>applied that defined the lexical and value space (range) that is applicable
>to a specific program environment. It's like a locale for types. Locales
>would be comparable, so that you could determine programmatically how the
>lexical/range definitions of one locale intersect another. You would then
>know which out-of-bounds conditions are possible.
Instead of describing these things as "X is of type Y", I'm thinking it
might be easier to define the value space through a transformation from a
lexical representation to a set of values which may or may not involve an
explicit cast operation. I'm much happier saying "treat X as of type Y for
this operation" - that leaves a lot more flexibility and room for fallbacks.
(Thinking about things like scientific notation makes me think that
fallbacks to multiple possible approaches for something as simple as a
'float' makes sense.)
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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