Is it relevant to warn about truncating real constants to 32 bits?
- by zneak
I'm toying around with LLVM and looking at what it would take to make yet another strongly-typed language, and now that I'm around the syntax, I've noticed that it seems to be a pet peeve of strongly typed language to warn people that their constants won't fit inside a float:
// both in Java and C#
float foo = 3.2;
// error: implicitly truncating a double into a float
// or something along these lines
Why doesn't this work in Java and C#? I know it's easy to add the f after the 3.2, but is it really doing anything useful? Must I really be that aware that I'm using single-precision reals instead of double-precision reals? Maybe I'm just missing something (which, basically, is why I'm asking).
Note that float foo = [const] is not the same thing as float foo = [double variable], where requiring the cast seems normal to me.
