Decimal is what the value is and stays first; hex and binary go beside it. It
is the wrong base for about half the numbers anyone opens this buffer for — a
colour is 0x303030FF, a gesture is an OR of flags, a mask is read a bit at a
time — and reading those out of a decimal is arithmetic done by hand.
In two places: under the header of a value opened on its own, and on each
numeric row of a field list. The second is the one that matters, because a leaf
cannot be stepped into, so the field list is the only place most numbers are
ever seen.
Nothing is asked of the program. It is arithmetic on text the renderer already
wrote, so it works on a stopped program and costs no round trip. Binary is
grouped in nibbles because a mask is read in nibbles. A negative is shown as
the 64-bit two's complement it is in memory and says the width out loud: the
rendered value carries none, and every Flan integer comes back through i64.
A float is left alone rather than answered wrongly — its bits are an IEEE
layout, reinterpreting them is a different question, and the rendered text does
not carry the width to answer it.
The pointer half of this is not done and the refusal now says why. Render.render
writes the bare word <ptr> for every pointer on purpose: it is the same renderer
print uses, an address is not stable across runs, and test_acceptance pins the
current text for that reason. Showing one is a decision about the language's
printer, not about this buffer.
Joseph Ferano
a0610cecd5