There are tons of languages that let you represent integers directly as integers rather than having everything be a float so that you do not have to worry about this problem at all.
Yes. Types are good. Numeric operations have specific hardware behavior that depends on whether you’re using floating-point or not. Having exclusively floating-point semantics is wildly wrong for a programming language.
@BatmanAoD IMHO both JavaScript and PHP were hacks. When introduced they were indeed excellent hacks, making difficult things possible for the first time. In as sane world they would have been discarded as prototypes, but once human greed enters the picture (and in the capitalist world that is ALL the time) sense goes out of the window and the gold rush begins. This is far from a new story (cf. California 1849).
There’s a proliferation of dynamically and/or softly typed languages. There are very few, if any, truly untyped languages. (POSIX shells come close, though internally they have at least two types, strings and string-arrays, even if the array type isn’t directly usable without non-POSIX features.)
TCL & CMake are fully stringly typed. Both pretty terrible languages (though TCL can at least claim to be a clever hack that was taken far too seriously).
There are tons of languages that let you represent integers directly as integers rather than having everything be a float so that you do not have to worry about this problem at all.
So by insanity you mean having just one number type?
Yes. Types are good. Numeric operations have specific hardware behavior that depends on whether you’re using floating-point or not. Having exclusively floating-point semantics is wildly wrong for a programming language.
@BatmanAoD IMHO both JavaScript and PHP were hacks. When introduced they were indeed excellent hacks, making difficult things possible for the first time. In as sane world they would have been discarded as prototypes, but once human greed enters the picture (and in the capitalist world that is ALL the time) sense goes out of the window and the gold rush begins. This is far from a new story (cf. California 1849).
I have managed to mostly avoid needing to code in either language, but my strong inclination is to agree that they are indeed hacks.
Opinions vary on this topic, apparently. There’s a proliferation of untyped languages.
There’s a proliferation of dynamically and/or softly typed languages. There are very few, if any, truly untyped languages. (POSIX shells come close, though internally they have at least two types, strings and string-arrays, even if the array type isn’t directly usable without non-POSIX features.)
TCL & CMake are fully stringly typed. Both pretty terrible languages (though TCL can at least claim to be a clever hack that was taken far too seriously).
Oof, yeah, those count. The fact that CMake was best-in-class when I wrote C++ professionally was…awful.