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From: wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: decimal points
Message-ID: <9102131829.AA12430@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 91 18:17:08 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: Mitch Bradley <wmb%MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM@SCFVM.GSFC.NASA.GOV>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

> The challenge I proposed was to find _one_ non-Forth book
> (English or not) in which embedding a decimal point in a number implied
> it was double precision integer

How many non-C books imply that the presence of an "L" implies a 32-bit
number?  How about "0x" for hexadecimal?

ANS Forth has a function >FLOAT that a program may call to parse a floating
point number.  The syntax that >FLOAT will accept is not necessarily the
same as the syntax that the text interpreter will accept.

>FLOAT may be used to import externally-generated ASCII floating point
numbers.

Similarly, in C, the number syntax that the C compiler accepts is
not necessarily the same as the syntax that scanf() accepts.

Mitch