Number
A mathematical concept used to count, measure and do other maths stuff.
Declaration
The Number type is implemented as double. Here's how to declare a number:
a = 5 # number declaration (immutable)
b: Number = 5 # same effect, with type-checking
c: Number = a # initiating from entry value, also 5
d = 43.14 # with decimals
To declare a mutable entry, prepend it with the tilde operator:
~ a = 6 # mutable number entry
a += 1 # adds 1 to 'a', yields 7
Operating numbers
Numbers accept quite a few operations:
==equal!=not equal+plus-minus*multiply/divide%modulus**power<less<=less or equal>more>=more or equal&logical AND|logical OR
Caveats
For logical operations and flow control, keep in mind that zero is falsy and non-zero is truthy.
For equality operators, although 0 and null are evaluated as falsy, in FatScript they are not the same:
0 == null # false
Precision
Although the arithmetic precision of a IEEE 754 double is higher, fry employs rounding tricks to improve human readability when printing long decimal sequences as text. Additionally, it uses an epsilon of 1.0e-06 for 'equality' comparisons between numbers.
In 99.999% of use cases, this approach provides both more convenient comparisons and more natural-looking numbers:
# Equality epsilon
x = 1.0e-06
x: Number = 0.000001
# Smaller differences are treated as the "same" number by comparison
x == 0.0000015
Boolean: true # the 0.0000005 difference is ignored
Floating-point numbers aren't distributed evenly on the number line. They are dense around 0, and as the magnitude increases, the 'delta' between two expressible values increases:
_____________________________________0_____________________________________
+infinity | | | | | | ||| | | | | | | -infinity
the biggest contiguous integer is 9,007,199,254,740,992 or 2^53
You can still have much larger numbers, around 10^308, which is:
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Bear in mind that if you add 1 to 10^308, no matter how many times you do it, it will always result in the same value! You need to add at least something near 10^293 in a single operation for it to be considered, as the numbers need to be of similar orders of magnitude. To discreetly handle numbers exceeding 2^53, consider using the HugeInt type.
Also, the infinity keyword provides a clear, unambiguous representation of values that soar into the realms beyond the largest expressible numbers, approaching the theoretical infinity.