What is 0.333 + 0.333 + 0.333 ? It’s of cause 0.999.
But if you mean 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 you suspect the result to be 1. Ada let you stop wondering about the amounts of bit of the target architecture, and instead explain to the compile what you really mean.

Sincerly Ville Witt (.net)

P.S.: I’m sorry if I was wrong about the above – I myself is quite new to Ada and is fascinated by it. We need people to update their Ada-on-Linux tutorials!

I’m not sure whether I understood correctly that of “infinite precision” in compilation-time computations related to literals.

In the line:

Zero : constant := 1.0 – 3.0 * One_Third;

, Zero is guaranteed to be 0.0 due only to the nature of the right-side operands of “:=”, or to the nature of the left-side argument (because Zero is a named number, and not a typed constant), or for both reasons?

I mean, would it be 0.0 in the same way if Zero were a floating-point typed constant, instead of a named number?

Thank you for your gem :-)

–
Francisco J. Montoya

4 mS is Millisiemens, not milliseconds (which is meant and I see often).

And on some devices, there are (still) no lower case characters.

So what would 10 MB mean?

kb = 1000
Kb = 1024

mb = 1000^2
Mb = 1024^2

etc

No, I haven’t ever heard someone use these prefixes, which is kind of sad because of the confusion you mention.

So I begin to spread the (old) news :-)

Thank you Christoph for bringing me up to date on this.

I wonder whether it is common practice these days
to talk about kilobinary bytes (or kibibytes :)

By the way for everyone’s benefit on page:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

NIST writes:

Because the SI prefixes strictly represent powers
of 10, they should not be used to represent powers
of 2. Thus, one kilobit, or 1 kbit, is 1_000 bit and
not 210 bit = 1_024 bit. To alleviate this ambiguity,
prefixes for binary multiples have been adopted by
the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
for use in information technology.

See

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

for the details.

I have changed the variable names so now instead of Kilobyte I use Kilobinary :)

today, on the day of the Lord, the 7#40.6.5565#, I have to tell you the sad truth that your numbers like Kilobyte are wrong.

Kilobyte = 1 kB = 10#1#e3 B, always,

see .

What you mean is Kibibyte = 1 KiB = 2#1#e10 B.

Please note the capitalisation: k kilo, Ki kilobinary.

It really makes a difference if you have 1 GiB or 1 GB. The difference amounts to 7#1_553_536_512# B.

Christoph ;-)