In my last update I had introduced the function c8::toull() to convert a natural number to an unsigned long long, and c8::toll() to convert an integer to a long long. Today I’ve added c8:todouble() to convert a rational to a double. This means that all 3 types now have a means of converting in and out of C++ native types.

In my previous update I had added c8::isull() and c8::isll() too, but I’ve now removed them. Implementing the matching c8::isdouble() would have been almost impossible as it would have had to do all of the same work as c8::todouble(), but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that they merely encouraged an imperative approach, and one of my aims was to design the c8 library to support functional-style programming as much as possible. I also realized that it was pretty trivial to implement their functionality in user code anyway (just compare against a pre-defined constant).

What’s in a name?

Having started at the todouble(), toll() and toull() style of names for a while I’ve also decided that the C++ standard naming is better. These have become to_double(), to_long_long(), to_unsigned_long_long(). Yes these are longer, and yes they take a little more space, but they’re also much more obvious, and yes I don’t like CamelCaseNames in C++ :-)