good reasons not to use D?

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sat, 2015-10-31 at 20:55 +0000, David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d-
learn wrote:
> On Saturday, 31 October 2015 at 18:23:43 UTC, rumbu wrote:
> > My opinion is that a decimal data type must be builtin in any 
> > modern language, not implemented as a library.
> 
> "must be builtin in any modern language" – which modern languages 
> actually have decimals as a built-in type, and what is your 
> rationale against having them as a solid library implementation? 
> It seems like it would only be interesting for a very fringe 
> sector of users (finance, and only the part of it that actually 
> deals with accounting).
> 
>   — David

It is really a question of symmetry: if there are hardware
implementations of both binary and denary floating point, then if a
language has binary floating point in the language, then it should have
denary floating point in the language. To support one hardware type in
the language but relegate another hardware type to the library is
inappropriate discrimination.

If I remember correctly (I am on a very poor Internet connection just
now and can't do the necessary research), IBM z-series has two
different denary hardware types, and there is currently a question as
to which of these to draw into the IEEE standard as the preferred type.
I think Intel are muttering about which one to support.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d-learn/attachments/20151101/54de064c/attachment.sig>