Hey I have been reading a bit through the sophia documentation and did a bit of the tutorial, and have these questions:
How do you represent floats in Sophia if it only has ints and uints?
How would you use an oracle for example, to get that the temperature in Sophia Bulgaria is 15.2 °C if you can’t use float as a data type? Or specify that your erc-20 token has 15 decimal places?
How come floats are used as a data type in the sophia tutorial? For example:
/* this is a tuple of 3 items, explained next */
type intCoordinates = (int, int, int);
type floatCoordinates = (float, float, float);
type coordinates('a) = ('a, 'a, 'a)
let buddy: coordinates(float) = (10.5, 20.5, 20.5)
or
type coord3d = (float, float, float)
let my3dCoordinates: coord3d = (20.0, 30.5, 100.0)
With int-s We currently do not yet have uint-s in Sophia, so please stick to int-s.
If you think about it, floats can easily be represented by int-s from a different denomination. Let’s say you have the number π. Since it is an irrational number, you can not represent it properly with floats. What do we do then? We pick a rounded version that fits our needs. If π = 3.14159..., we might as well use the rounded value of 3.14. Now we have a proper denomination (2 digits after the decimal point) and we can build our math upon this. With ints π would be 314, the number 42 would be represented as 4200 and etc.
It depends on what you need. If a precision of 1 digit after the decimal point is all you need, you can represent 15.2 °C as 152. If you need more precision, you can use a smaller denomination.
Please point me to that tutorial, I could not find it in Sophia’s description. In the whole protocol repository, these are all the mentions of floats:
$ grep -r "float" .
./consensus/consensus.md:a floating point value.
./consensus/consensus.md:Now, the problem is that we can't do any floating point arithmetic (to
./contracts/sophia.md:languages, such as floating point arithmetic, are not present in Sophia, and
We currently do not yet have 