Floating point support?

[Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it>]

I'm thinking about adding some floating point support to zsh; this is just
to canvas opinions.  My idea is to add a floating point parameter type,
together with support in math evaluations (which would involve stuff like
promoting integers to floats etc.).  It would be easiest to make the
floating point type the same size as the integer type, i.e. usually double
if longs are 64 bits or if long longs are in use, float otherwise.

- Does anyone object to sullying the integral purity of zsh with decimal
points and exponents?

- Is anyone able to summarise what the status is with other shells
(particularly ksh)?

- What about functions?  We could supply some basic maths functions, or
could put them in a loadable module, which would require yet more support
for hooks, although it's certainly more flexible (write your own library
routines).  This may mean some more configuration checking for
capabilities, although I think basic maths library routines are universal.
(We could even make it forget to put -lm on the link line the first time,
just to make users feel at home :-) :-).)

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ibmth.df.unipi.it>       Tel: +39 050 844536
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy