Re: Pointers to "why C behaves like that ?"

"jacob navia" <jacob@jacob.remcomp.fr> writes:


>When you support several types of integers and floating point data like in C
>this kind of inference becomes extremely complex.


Most popular languages which support type inference also support
several numeric types. For example, Haskell 98 supports Int
(machine-specific bounded precision), Integer (unbounded precision),
Float, Double, Rational, Complex Float, Complex Double. Current
Haskell implementations also support Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64 and
their unsigned variants Word8, Word16, Word32, and Word64. The
Glasgow Haskell compiler complicates things even further by adding
unboxed variants of the primitive numeric types: Int#, Float# and
Double#, IIRC.


The most pertinent issue on which these languages differ from C is
that C has much more complex handling of implicit conversions, whereas
these languages tend to avoid implicit conversions (with some
exceptions such as the way Haskell treats numeric literals as being
implicitly overloaded for all the appropriate numeric types).


--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne | of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

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