🚀 go-pugleaf

::: The semantic model of the language can, however, greatly inhibit the
::: programmer.  Try communicating floating binary from one machine to
::: another; the only semi-portable way I have seen are to convert to
::: higher precision floating decimal, transmit that, and convert back.
:: What does that have to do with the semantic model of the language?
:: That's a very hardware related issue. [...] internal
:: float format [...]

: From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
: Message-ID: <Bxz8px.FBx@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
: Did I say anything about matching the internal representations of
: the numbers?  We can communicate binary integers across machines
: and implementations; the much used notation 0ddddd for octal and
: 0xdddddddd for hexadecimal, bad as they are, do this explicitly.

So, what does this have to do with the semantic model of the language?
What prevents one from converting the floats to binary representation
in ascii, transmitting that, reading the result, and doing the
inverse conversion?

Presumably Herman is complaining either that it isn't built into the
syntax of the language (which is not a semantic model issue), or that
it isn't available in the standard runtime package of the language
(which is STILL not a semantic model issue).  (The former is a
syntactic issue, the latter an application feature coverage issue.  
Again, *NEITHER* is a semantic model issue.)

One more possibility is that Herman is complaining that one can't
portably write a convert-to-binary-ascii routine without access to
operations on floating point numbers not in the language.  But it'd
still be questionable if this were a semantic model issue.  If this IS
what Herman means, I'd appreciate his being specific as to what
operations are missing.

Semantic model issues are things such as "do side-effects exist
explicitly in the language" and "can operators be short-circuiting" and
"what is the argument passage model" and "do names specify variables or
values" and "must all types be known at compile-time" and "is
mixed-mode arithmetic allowed (borderline...)" and so on and on.
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw