Re: Lua 5.3 work1 Considering math.isinteger or type()

[Eric Wing <ewmailing@...>]

> Out of curiosity… as the 46 (and counting) messages in this thread haven't
> made it very clear, at least to me… why do we even care if a number is an
> integer, float, real, double, whatnot? Isn't the purpose of that int vs.
> float dichotomy to be purely an implementation detail? Wholly transparent?
> And a number stays a number? Irrespectively of internal representation? Or?

For me, knowing this is important for language binding/bridging.
Sometimes knowing the type is important for doing the more optimal
thing, and in a few cases doing the right thing. For example, in
Cocoa, I may need to know what the number type is to box it with the
correct incantation of NSNumber method constructors (i.e. is it a
double or integer).

It isn't the common case, but it does come up and this isn't a debug usage.

I see that the C API already has a lua_isinteger which suits my
particular needs already. However, if I implemented more of the
language bridge on the Lua side instead of the C side, this would be a
bigger issue for me.

Thanks,
Eric
-- 
Beginning iPhone Games Development
http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook/