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Alan Watson <a.watson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Or quotient-and-remainder. Isn't "+" sufficiently overloaded as it is > without having it stand for "and" :-) quotient&remainder? Unfortunately quotient,remainder is not a valid identifier. >> Mathematically, mixed exactness complex numbers makes no sense. >> Twisting the whole numeric tower around this artifice is wrong. > > Maybe, but a cheap way to get an inexact imaginary is an number with > an exact zero for its real part and an inexact real for its imaginary > part. If I understood what William Kahan tried to say in one of his articles, it is that it's sometimes essential to distinguish between the real part being 0, 0.0, and -0.0, where having only 0.0 and -0.0 is insufficient. He called the first variant "imaginary type", as in C99, and claimed that Java made a mistake by providing only a complex type with two floating point parts. I might be wrong however because I did not understand the technical reasoning behind that. I think it had something to do with choosing the right sides near branch cuts, or maybe with 0 not flipping to the other side on negation, in contrast to 0.0 and -0.0. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/