From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2012-01-24T09:53:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Microrant on Ruy's Math Skills

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:

> > Ruby is pretty dynamic.  It seems entirely reasonable to consider whether
> > Float could be redefined to dispatch to BigDecimal except when called
> > explicitly, for instance.
>
> Except for that whole "parse time is different from run time" part you
> seem to be blithely ignoring. If you've already parsed float literals, then
> they're floats and are already lossy.

Unless the parser stores a string representation in addition to the
float itself.  Then at runtime, the string rep could be used to
instantiate a BigDecimal if that runtime option has been activated.

Of course, I'm NOT advocating this!