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From: nels@astrovax.UUCP (Nels Anderson)
Newsgroups: net.lang.mod2
Subject: Re: Significant Changes to the Language Modula-2
Message-ID: <814@astrovax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Nov-86 12:17:42 EST
Article-I.D.: astrovax.814
Posted: Thu Nov  6 12:17:42 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Nov-86 20:07:29 EST
References: <533@tikal.UUCP>
Reply-To: nels@astrovax.UUCP (Nels Anderson)
Organization: Princeton University, Dept. of Astrophysics
Lines: 16


With regard to changes in Modula-2, I'd like to propose a couple of
things that would make some sense from the point of view of a not-
very-sophisticated programmer.  If M2 is not intended to be used for
scientific programming, then these comments should be ignored.  If, on
the other hand, it is to someday challenge FORTRAN as the language used
by the many scientists who do program, a couple of additions would be
handy:

	1)  an exponentiation operator (`**' in FORTRAN), and
	2)  double and single precision floating point types.

I'm sure these two features are of little interest to those concerned
with the more interesting and elegant aspects of programming, but most
of the programming done by scientists is fairly mundane number
crunching.