Numbers in Programming Languages
Low-level programmers have to worry about unsigned and signed, fixed and floating-point numbers. They have to write extremely different code, with different opcodes and operands, to add two floating point numbers compared to the code to add two integers.
However, high-level programming languages such as LISP and Python offer an abstract number that may be an expanded type such as rational, bignum, or complex. Programmers in LISP or Python (among others) have some assurance that their program code will Do The Right Thing with mathematical operations. Due to operator overloading, mathematical operations on any number—whether signed, unsigned, rational, floating-point, fixed-point, integral, or complex—are written exactly the same way. Others languages, such as REXX and Java, provide decimal floating-points, which avoids many "unexpected" results.
Read more about this topic: Computer Number Format
Famous quotes containing the words numbers, programming and/or languages:
“Old age equalizes—we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)