Evaluation contexts

Evaluation contexts

coNCePTuaL normally evaluates arithmetic expressions in “integer context”, meaning that each subexpression is truncated to the nearest integer after being evaluated. Hence, ‘24/5*5’ is ‘20’, not ‘24’, because ‘24/5*5’ = ‘(24/5)*5’ = ‘4*5’ = ‘20’. There are a few situations, however, in which coNCePTuaL evaluates expressions in “floating-point context”, meaning that no truncation occurs:

• within an OUTPUTS statement (see Writing to standard output)
• within a LOGS statement (see Writing to a log file)
• within a BACKEND EXECUTES statement (see Injecting arbitrary code)
• within a range in a FOR EACH statement (see Range loops) when coNCePTuaL is unable to find an arithmetic or geometric progression by evaluating the component <expr>s in integer context

Within any of the preceding statements, the expression ‘24/5*5’ evaluates to 24. Furthermore, the expression ‘24/5’ evaluates to 4.8, which is a number that can’t be entered directly in a coNCePTuaL program. (The language supports only integral constants, as mentioned in Primitives.)

The coNCePTuaL language provides a special form called REAL, which resembles a single-argument function. When evaluated in floating-point context, REAL returns its argument evaluated normally, as if ‘REAL’ were absent. When evaluated in integer context, however, REAL evalutes its argument in floating-point context and then rounds the result to the nearest integer. For example, in integer context, ‘9/2 + 1/2’ is ‘4’ while ‘REAL(9/2 + 1/2)’ is ‘5’.