It’s just data
I’ve added decimal literals and support for both unary and binary operators on top of SpiderMonkey. My approach is that when all arguments are Decimal, the results are Decimal; otherwise the precision is lost. An example to make it clear:
js> 1.21 - 1.11 0.09999999999999987 js> 1.21 - 1.11m 0.09999999999999987 js> 1.21m - 1.11 0.09999999999999987 js> 1.21m - 1.11m 0.10
Sam Ramji: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.
Eran Hammer-Lahav: This morning at OSCON, David Recordon announced the creation of the Open Web Foundation. The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.
If this group evolves to the point where it finds the right balance of enabling and getting out of the way, this foundation could be a very handy thing to have around.
slides for OSCON 2008 presentation
A number of the members of the audience were more informed on the subject than I was (excellent!).
Avery Pennarun: The git developers don’t track bugs. If you find a bug, you can write about it on the mailing list. You might get flamed. And then probably someone will ask you to fix it yourself and send in a patch. This is unlike almost all other open source projects.
Sometimes ideas take time to percolate. When I first saw Avery’s post, it didn’t quite sink in.
Joseph Scott: we can definitely use more people looking at the XML-RPC and AtomPub code.
My experience matches Jeff’s, namely that post 2.3; contributions of time in terms of showing up on the IRC channel; producing and commenting on both bug and feature requests; and in terms producing actual patches, rarely produces the desired result.
Bug 445178 (decimal) – Implement Decimal Support
Thanks John!
Update: Downloadable standalone SpiderMonkey executables for Darwin, Linux, and Windows.
js> print(new Decimal("8.5"));
8.5
OK, so it is not much yet. But it is a constructor, a toString method, and a finalizer. And it makes use of decQuadFromString and decQuadToString from the decNumber library. And it is in the context of a real codebase, namely SpiderMonkey, which is what Firefox uses. And it is in a public repository that you can clone, pull, and download from; and perhaps even try building yourself or patching.
Monetary units around the world are often expressed in terms of decimal numbers. You would think that by this time computers would be adept at handling such, but as this page indicates, sadly such is not the case for JavaScript today. This befuddles businessmen and causes application developers to focus attention on unnecessary details unrelated to solving the problem at hand.
One of my tasks is to write the spec text for future revisions of ECMAScript to address this by introducing a notion of a Decimal class. As currently envisioned, this will be accomplished in three layers.
My son voluntarily enlisted in the Air Force yesterday. He heads off for Basic Training on October 28th.
I’m not yet sure of the details, but apparently his assignment will involve the maintenance and service of on-board radar equipment.
Joe Gregorio: The rapid ascendency of distributed version control
Anybody know where I can find a recent tarball for Mercurial? The download site appears to be down.
span, div, or table elements. Over time, the hope is to make it so that all new comments are valid. ...
Bryon Jacob and Chris Berry: AtomServer is an off-the-shelf implementation of an Atom Store. It is implemented as a Java web application, and should deploy into any J2EE Servlet Container. Under the covers, AtomServer uses the Apache Project’s open-source implementation of the Atom Protocol, called Abdera, to process the RESTful verbs and XML vocabulary of Atom.
I see that it has test cases. Good.
If AtomServer is a framework extracted from Homeaway, I wonder if a generic Atom Store test suite could be extracted from the AtomStore test cases.
The thoughts are that perhaps it might be handy to have a Python one that can be deployed on Google App Engine, or a PHP version that could be run pretty much anywhere...
Eric Lawrence: we’ve provided web-applications with the ability to opt-out of MIME-sniffing. Sending the new authoritative=true attribute on the Content-Type HTTP response header prevents Internet Explorer from MIME-sniffing a response away from the declared content-type
While I’m not a fan of content-sniffing, one of my few pet peeves with HTML5 is that it endeavors to institutionalize the practice with no provisions for content providers to opt out. As the lesser of the available evils, I hope Microsoft’s proposal is quickly adopted by other browsers.