in reply to Okay! What!?!?!?

I don’t rightly know what the (stringwise ...) eq operator would do in this obviously-numeric case, and I would not want to find out, even if someone proclaimed that it “worked.”

Clearly, this is just a prototypical example of why you can never (in any programming language other than COBOL) test a fractional number for “exact equality.”   Even if the binary value rounds to exactly the same sequence of printed digits, and thus “to our human eyes” is ‘the same number,’ it is the binary values that are being compared by the computer, and these are almost certain to be “unequal.”

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Re^2: Okay! What!?!?!?
by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 23, 2014 at 05:10 UTC
    Clearly, this is just a prototypical example of why you can never (in any programming language other than COBOL) test a fractional number for “exact equality.”

    Only if by "fractional number" you actually mean floating-point number. It works fine with actual fractional numbers:

    $ perl6 -e 'say 10 + 14.4 - 10 == 14.4'
True

    [download]

    (Perl 6 stores those as actual fractions, and does exact math with them; you only get floating points if the fractions overflow, or if you request them with the scientific notation 14.4e0).

    Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed
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[d/l]
      He said "programming language," not multi-decade performance art. COBOL has users.
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