[phobos] phobos commit, revision 1833

[David Simcha]

The logic here was that, really, the cast to real should be implicit, 
but using implicit casts would be ambiguous, so I created an explicit 
sqrt() for every integer type that explicitly casts to real.

On 8/12/2010 3:39 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday 11 August 2010 23:40:17 Daniel Murphy wrote:
>    
>> Do we really want the sqrt of a integer to return a real?
>> I would expect it to return floor(sqrt(n)), in the same way that integer
>> division does.
>> What do other people think/expect?
>>      
>
> That seems rather limiting. Don't you usually want a floating point value from
> sqrt? If you want an int, you can just cast the result. Otherwise, you're going
> to have to cast the ints that you pass to sqrt() in order to get a floating value
> result, which would tend to be even more annoying - particularly since I would
> expect the programmer to want a floating point result normally anyway. On top of
> that, because an int value can be held just fine in a floating point, making
> sqrt() return an int could easily cause bugs where someone expects it to return
> a floating value and assigns it to a floating value. The assignment works just
> fine, but they never get the result that they expect, and they may have a hard
> time tracking down such a bug.
>
> If it returns a real, then it does what I would expect most people to want, and
> if you want an int, you have to cast it. It's nice and clear, and you don't have
> errors due to something being a type that you don't expect.
>
> - Jonathan MDavis
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