Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

re: Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

r0ck — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:17:28 GMT

Might be kinda dumb, but I learned VBScript by making keyboard macros. I used this website to get started http://vbscript-macro-template.blogspot.com/

Floating Point Arithmetic, Part One

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:08:11 GMT

A month ago I was discussing some of the issues in integer arithmetic , and I said that issues in floating

Hex SID to Decimal SID Translation « Scripting. Stuff. (By Froosh)

Hex SID to Decimal SID Translation « Scripting. Stuff. (By Froosh) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:32:10 GMT

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Floating Point Arithmetic, Part One

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 01:13:00 GMT

Floating Point Arithmetic, Part One

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 22:34:00 GMT

re: Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

Norman Diamond — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 01:29:00 GMT

I even had a colleague who was a software engineer, more highly paid than me and seemed to be deserving of it, who participated in development of debuggers and such stuff ... and one day it turned out that she wasn't aware of two's complement. That was sure startling. I don't think I ever asked what she had studied in university, but that wasn't the moment to ask anyway.

There are quite a lot of engineers who don't understand that floating point has less than perfect precision in hardware and in ordinary programming languages, and they don't know how to deal with the fact. Even someone who did a C-style printf to write numbers with 3 digits after the decimal point and then read them back later didn't understand that the results didn't match the original numbers before they were written. I don't know if this is harder or easier than two's complement, and in these cases maybe the engineering skills aren't in the computer area, but still... You have to learn to be patient with some of these people.

Of course when someone has studied the matter and still manages to be unaware of it, or when someone markets a product and it fails and they renege on their warranties because they don't understand it, then it's different.

re: Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

Mat Hall — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 18:46:00 GMT

Sorry, didn't mean to be condescending; it was genuine surprise! (I don't have a comp sci degree either, by the way.) I was also a bit surprised that in your explanation you didn't mention its name...

re: Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

Eric Lippert — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 17:30:00 GMT

Dude, contain the condescension.

A considerable majority of script developers have no computer science degree. Many have no formal training in programming whatsoever -- their entire knowledge of programming languages comes from reading existing scripts and puzzling them out, maybe with a copy of "Learn VBScript in 21 Days" at hand. They have no idea what "twos complement" means. Why would they? It's an implementation detail that is usually abstracted away.

re: Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

Mat Hall — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:12:00 GMT

"You might wonder why it is that we use such a goofy way to represent negative integers..."

Are there actually people reading this who are unaware of two's complement?

re: Integer Arithmetic in VBScript, Part Two

Norman Diamond — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:21:00 GMT

> Indeed, I did discuss that last year, here.

"here" says:

> .Text - Application Error!
> Details
> NullReferenceException
> Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

By the way, even though you showed (and I thank you) that in cases where programmers want unsigned longs in VB it really does turn out to be not so hard to produce printable strings showing their values in decimal, still don't you think that conversion to double precision floating is slightly sub-optimal? VB has unsigned bytes; why haven't unsigned longs ever been added?

> (The exact details of how zeros, infinities,
> nans and denormals work in floating point
> arithmetic is a subject for another day.)

You misspelled "decade".