On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| GHC is oddly particular about decimal points in "read"-ing in | of Doubles in scientific notation. It seems that read | "3.0e-06" is acceptable but read "3e-06" is not (both read | "3" and read "3.0" work fine as Doubles). It's the same in (snip) It's an unforced change and therefore to be regarded with deep suspicion. I'd be interested in people's views about this.
I was actually recently caught out by this - I'd assumed that 3e-06 would work (as it does in Modula-3, etc.), and it didn't. Personally, my preference would be for it to mean just the same as 3.0e-06 - it's annoying having to go through my physical constants now adding the rather-redundant ".0"'s everywhere. (-: But, with the sort of parsing I'm doing, "terms" are largely separated by whitespace anyway; maybe if they weren't I'd want things different. -- Mark