Binary Numbers and Arithmetic

ID:1541597
 
Apr 10 2014, 10:54 pm
Applies to:DM Language
Status: Open
Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
Out of curiosity, I decided to explore DM's support for non-decimal numbers.
It seems that all the standard operators will take hex and octal with no complaints.
In fact, they work just fine even when mixing bases, e.g.
0xF2 + 072 * (1287-0xA7) ** 03


Surprisingly, however, DM does not appear to support binary!
This is not a particularly pressing issue, since i'm sure we all feel comfortable converting decimal to up to 16 bits of binary in our heads by now (though my TI-36X can only claim 8).
On the other hand, considering the extensive support for octal and hex, i can't imagine it'd be all that difficult to embrace binary as well.

PS: It seems that many built-in procs choke on non-decimal numbers, for example text2num(). I'm not sure whether to file bug reports about these, since non-decimal functionality is completely undocumented and may (sadly) be deprecated.

PPS: I'd suggest changing
error: bad number
to
error: this makes octalpus sad :(
It is both slightly more amusing and significantly more informative.
Apr 22 2014, 6:02 am
I just don't see the point of adding binary parsing to the language. Anyone who can wrangle binary can wrangle hexadecimal. Frankly I think even octal is kind of silly; it was never a well thought-out base for programming and I'm surprised C ever supported it intrinsically.
Apr 23 2014, 7:42 am
Yeah, this isn't exactly a serious request.
If it's ever helpful to represent certain things in binary/other bases, the CPP can handle it anyway.

On the other hand, DM's octal & hex support came as a surprise.
I actually discovered it while trying to use leading zeros on something: the compiler threw "bad number" as soon as it hit "08".

Is there a proper place to make requests for documentation?
I can think of several features that would probably be better found in the Reference than through trial-and-error.

Apr 23 2014, 8:58 am
Feature requests could be such a place, or any dev help forum, where users could give input on an undocumented feature.
Apr 23 2014, 10:50 am
The hex support isn't documented? It's been a while since I looked but I would expect that to be documented somewhere.
Apr 23 2014, 12:38 pm
It's not in either the Ref or Guide, not sure what else is considered official
Apr 23 2014, 12:42 pm
Huh. Well that's something I'd like to remedy at some point, then.