Display numbers in hex, binary, etc

[tv42]

Hi. Nice project, love the programmer-friendly bit manipulation. However, this was a little disappointing:

mathcat> 0b1101001 << 1
210

I wish I could get the result out in bits/hex/etc.

[soudy]

Hi, thanks for the feedback.
I like this idea, perhaps add a command like @mode <mode> where is decimal, hex or binary. It would be difficult and perhaps undesireable to automatically return the result in for example binary if binary happens to be used in the expression.

[tv42]

Yeah. Though I can't help but wonder what would happen if one treats the output format of a number a "sticky" property as values are passed through computation, with combining rules in the spirit of Go's untyped constants.

mathcat> 0b1
0b1
mathcat> 0b1 + 1    ("untyped" 1)
0b10

Then have rules that say which one wins in case of multiple conflicting ones; e.g.

mathcat> 0b1 + 0d1
2  (decimal wins)
mathcat> 0b1 + 0d1
0b10  (left one wins)
mathcat> 0b1 + 0d1
2  (right one wins)

(Instead of my invented 0d42 decimal literal format, you could also do just dec(42))

Right one wins has the nice property that you can often arrow-up, +0b0, enter to change the format. Kinda like how some dynamic languages do data types. Not sure if that's a good idea ;)

Probably something like dec(_) is nicer, "format the last value as decimal".

[soudy]

That would be ideal, but tough to implement as the parser has no concept of hex, binary or decimal, everything is a float in the end. I'm sure it's doable though. For example by lexing it first and checking the most common type of literal, since the lexer is aware of the type literal.

I'll have to look into this some more, if you have any ideas I'd be glad to hear them.