Reading floating point

[David Feuer]

It doesn't, and it never has.

On Oct 10, 2016 6:08 PM, "Carter Schonwald" <carter.schonwald at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Read should accept exactly the valid source literals for a type.
>
> On Monday, October 10, 2016, David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What does any of that have to do with the Read instances?
>>
>> On Oct 10, 2016 1:56 PM, "Carter Schonwald" <carter.schonwald at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The right solution is to fix things so we have scientific notation
>>> literal rep available.  Any other contortions run into challenges in
>>> repsentavility of things.  That's of course ignoring denormalized floats,
>>> infinities, negative zero and perhaps nans.
>>>
>>> At the very least we need to efficiently and safely support everything
>>> but nan. And I have some ideas for that I hope to share soon.
>>>
>>> On Monday, October 10, 2016, David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I fully expect this to be somewhat tricky, yes. But some aspects of the
>>>> current implementation strike me as pretty clearly non-optimal. What I
>>>> meant about going through Rational is that given "625e-5", say, it
>>>> calculates 625%100000, producing a fraction in lowest terms, before calling
>>>> fromRational, which itself invokes fromRat'', a division function optimized
>>>> for a special case that doesn't seem too relevant in this context. I could
>>>> be mistaken, but I imagine even reducing to lowest terms is useless here.
>>>> The separate treatment of the digits preceding and following the decimal
>>>> point doesn't do anything obviously useful either. If we (effectively)
>>>> normalize in decimal to an integral mantissa, for example, then we can
>>>> convert the whole mantissa to an Integer at once; this will balance the
>>>> merge tree better than converting the two pieces separately and combining.
>>>>
>>>> On Oct 10, 2016 6:00 AM, "Yitzchak Gale" <gale at sefer.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The way I understood it, it's because the type of "floating point"
>>>> literals is
>>>>
>>>> Fractional a => a
>>>>
>>>> so the literal parser has no choice but to go via Rational. Once you
>>>> have that, you use the same parser for those Read instances to ensure
>>>> that the result is identical to what you would get if you parse it as
>>>> a literal in every case.
>>>>
>>>> You could replace the Read parsers for Float and Double with much more
>>>> efficient ones. But you would need to provide some other guarantee of
>>>> consistency with literals. That would be more difficult to achieve
>>>> than one might think - floating point is deceivingly tricky. There are
>>>> already several good parsers in the libraries, but I believe all of
>>>> them can provide different results than literals in some cases.
>>>>
>>>> YItz
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 10:27 PM, David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> > The current Read instances for Float and Double look pretty iffy from
>>>> an
>>>> > efficiency standpoint. Going through Rational is exceedingly weird:
>>>> we have
>>>> > absolutely nothing to gain by dividing out the GCD, as far as I can
>>>> tell.
>>>> > Then, in doing so, we read the digits of the integral part to form an
>>>> > Integer. This looks like a detour, and particularly bad when it has
>>>> many
>>>> > digits. Wouldn't it be better to normalize the decimal representation
>>>> first
>>>> > in some fashion (e.g., to 0.xxxxxxexxx) and go from there? Probably
>>>> less
>>>> > importantly, is there some way to avoid converting the mantissa to an
>>>> > Integer at all? The low digits may not end up making any difference
>>>> > whatsoever.
>>>> >
>>>> >
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>>>> >
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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