Re: boolean operators

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 28-Sep-06, at 4:27 PM, Glenn Maynard wrote:

> I was speaking the other way around: floats represent integers, and
> integers represent bit strings; if that means integers are a 
> fundamental
> type, bit strings are too.  They both seem equally contrived.

Not at all. The float 1.0 doesn't represent the integer 1. It is an 
integer. (That is, it is a precise description of the integer 1). 
Arithmetic with such integers continues to be platonically integral 
until you reach the representational limit of the floating point 
implementation, say 2^53.

I suspect that you think of floating point numbers as imprecise, but 
there is another view, supported by IEEE-759, which is that every 
floating point number is a precise representation of some quantity, but 
the operations on the floating point numbers are imprecise (although 
highly deterministic: there is only one correct value for most 
operations, because the answer must be the closest representable value; 
if two values satisfy this constraint, then the rounding mode is used 
to select between them.)

Anyway, I have this growing suspicion that we are simply have different 
views on this issue and continuing to discuss it, amusing though it 
might be for by-standers, will resolve nothing.