RE: [gawk-devel] MPFR thoughts

[Neil R. Ormos]

Carl Friedberg wrote:
> [... Manuel Collado wrote:]
>> [Eli Zaretskii wrote:]

>>> ...
>>> Gawk is a general-purpose language,
>>> and as such, it isn't outlandish
>>> for Gawk to provide extended-precision arithmetics.

>> Please let me respectfully disagree. IMHO gawk
>> is a kind of domain-specific language. Focused
>> of processing textual representation of data,
>> i.e. strings. Of course some numeric
>> computation capability is needed, but only to
>> some extension.

>> Not being the main purpose of gawk, this
>> capability can be provided as an extension, as
>> already said. No need to be integrated in the
>> gawk core.

> Thank you. I agree with the removal of MPFR
> support. I am not in any way an AWK/GAWK
> developer, nor do I have the skills needed.

I am not a member of the Gawk developers mailing list, but since thoughts about 
removing MPFR from Gawk have been mentioned on this Bug-Gawk list, I offer this 
user comment.

I appreciate the GNU MP and MPFR support in Gawk and urge that it not be 
removed.  I have found the MPFR feature quite useful, e.g., for experimentation 
to explore the behavior of a calculation when spreadsheets didn't work.

Even if Gawk is seen by many as primarily a text processing language, Gawk has 
proven to be amazingly versatile in my practice, providing a marvelous tradeoff 
between functionality and simplicity.

There may be well be better languages for specific problem domains, 
particularly for production systems, but Gawk is often quite adequate for 
proof-of-concept and other prototyping, avoiding the large up-front cost of 
acquiring fluency in some special-purpose language, along with its required 
tool chain and infinity of libraries and modules.  Removing the MPFR support 
from Gawk would reduce its versatility.

Finally, it would be a shame to let the undiplomatic complaints of a single 
user serve as the catalyst for the removal of important functionality from 
Gawk.  To the extent Gawk -M behavior is library-dependent and cannot feasibly 
be reconciled with Gawk's non-dash-M behavior, instead of removing MPFR 
support, it would seem sufficient to warn users that the behavior may vary and 
that such variation will not, alone, be treated as a bug.

> We owe Arnold Andy, and all the others who have
> supported AWK over the generations a huge thank
> you

Indeed.  Thank you Arnold, Andy, Eli, and all the others.