Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!pacbell.com!ames!dftsrv!stars.gsfc.nasa.gov!warnock
From: warnock@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov (ARCHIE WARNOCK)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: decimal points
Message-ID: <4327@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: 14 Feb 91 13:34:07 GMT
References: <9102131829.AA12430@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: news@dftsrv.gsfc.nasa.gov
Reply-To: warnock@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - Greenbelt, MD, USA
Lines: 21
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.3-4

In article <9102131829.AA12430@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM 
(Mitch Bradley) writes...
>How many non-C books imply that the presence of an "L" implies a 32-bit
>number?  How about "0x" for hexadecimal?

I passed this by and almost didn't bother to post a reply and later 
realized that some people might not have realized you were joking.  
Certainly, I have far too much respect for your intelligence and for 
what you've contributed to the Forth community to believe you'd offer 
such a specious argument with a straight face.

For those who may not get the joke, the distinction is that 0x15 or 15L 
don't have other interpretations in common usage, while 1.5 does.  I 
could post you screen dumps from a spreadsheet, from a database, from 
ASCII output from _any_ other computer languages, from prompts for user 
input and from a vast, vast majority of book, magazines and other common 
sources of information.  All of them would interpret 1.5 as a decimal 
number.  Some might interpret 1,5 as a decimal number instead but none 
would interpret it as an integer (long or otherwise).

Archie