RE: what most every language is missing :-)

["Anton van Straaten" <address@hidden>]

Guy Steele wrote:
> It's dangerous to make jokes about programming languages:
> almost every parody feature you can think of has already
> been tried out seriously.
>
> In this case, for interval arithmetic, where a numerical
> quantity is represented by a lower and upper bound for
> a segment of the real number line that contains the
> quantity of interest, sometimes the best you can do
> is ask whether "x possibly equals y".

The first thing that came to my mind on seeing the original post was fuzzy
logic.  That bears some similarity to real-line interval arithmetic, since
the questions being asked tend to be things like "is this value more or less
within this range?"

Of course, this is pretty easy to implement in any language, so the joke
fails on multiple levels...  :)

Anton