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by scotty79 1613 days ago
Some ideas...

Language that represent numbers as rationals and always gives you precise calculations (unless you explicitly want to round them up).

Language that can tell apart 1 meter from 1 second (units like in Frink lang).

Language that has various data structures with consistent interface (like Scala) up to and including relational tables and graphs.

That has structural composable declarative query language that can reach into arbitrary nesting of those data structures with features that allow to build indexes to perform those queries efficiently.

That has features for serializing those structures and indexes into files and using them live from disk instead of ram. (why not have 1TB set in my program?).

Language that can pick a data structure or combination of them that provide capabilities you specify. For example if I want a structure that is fast at inserting elements, checking their presence and taking smallest element (with respect to some measure) I should get sorted linked list combined with a set.

3 comments

  >> Language that represent numbers as rationals
so π would be represented as π/1 or τ/2?

Also wouldn't it make comparisons quite expensive?

I don't mind having option of purely symbolic computation but by default I don't want them.

Instead od Pi I'd prefer to have Pi(3) equal exactly 3.14, or Pi(2) equal exactly 3.1 and so on.

Since numbers would be kept as smallest numerator, denominator pair comparison would be just compaing those.

Haskell has the first four of those features, although it can't directly use the disk or figure out what data structure you'd need.
For the first, Mathematica