Re: Broken date math on AppleScript 2.0
Re: Broken date math on AppleScript 2.0
- Subject: Re: Broken date math on AppleScript 2.0
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:52:39 -0500
"Unwarranted" is a value judgement. Applescript is designed for users
who neither know nor care how numbers are represented in bits.
Automatically promoting makes perfect sense. It's the fact that the
addition doesnt yield the right result numerically that makes it a
bug.
On 2/21/08, Philip Aker <email@hidden> wrote:
> On 2008-02-20, at 08:04:42, Axel Luttgens wrote:
>
> > Le 20 févr. 08 à 16:11, Mark J. Reed a écrit :
>
> >> Yes, there is a bug in date conversion.
>
> > The problem seems to be somewhat subtler...
> > It was already noted by Donald back in November:
> > http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users/2007/Nov/
> > msg00511.html
> > and I couldn't even decide at that time whether it is by accident
> > that real numbers came into the picture...
> > But one thing is sure: 10.5.2 hasn't addressed the issue. ;-)
>
> >> But there's nothing wrong with AS using 29-bit integers,
> >> especially since it automatically (and mostly seamlessly) promotes
> >> to floating point as needed to represent bigger numbers.
>
> > Right; moreover, the language's specification clearly states the fact.
>
> Maybe that was good enough in 1992, but not anymore. And just because
> you two happen to think that unwarranted integer->float promotion is
> ok doesn't make it correct.
>
> These days, XML rules. The bottom line is exact interchange with XML
> data-types. I'm sure the AppleScript team could fix it in a flash but
> the source of this problem is that CFNumber/NSNumber (OS X native
> number "classes") don't have unsigned types (nor OSTypes as a storage
> classification). This means that any coordination of AppleScript
> unsigned number types to the native number types entails a loss of
> information. Consequently, AppleScript is still _forced_ to waste 2
> bits for the sign. That's not acceptable for matching up to the
> bottom line international standard. If you read through the links to
> CFDate I posted previously, you will have noted also how AppleScript
> is living in the past by still passing DateTimeRec in AppleEvents.
>
>
> Philip Aker
> echo email@hidden@nl | tr a-z@. p-za-o.@
>
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--
Mark J. Reed <email@hidden>
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