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Sat Jul 23 16:06:17 CEST 2011

Types for DSP language

To simplify type conversions, let's stick to two types: machine
integers and floating point numbers.  Integers can represent bools,
but floats and ints are fundamentally different.

I don't like the Pure Data approach of encoding ints in floats.  Many
algorithms need exact counting and using floats for that is too
dangerous and unnecessarily inefficient for low-level rep.

Now it's important to distinguish two factors:

  - embedding of constants

  - being able to qualify operations or values as typed

The embedding isn't such a big deal.  I don't think I ever ran into
integer constants that can't be embedded in a double apart from raw
memory addresses.  The real issue is typed computations.

I run into this problem with (Expr a) as (Expr Double) or (Expr
Integer).  The type only refers to constants, not necessarily to the
type of variables (which are essentially untyped).

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