What would you remove from Elixir?

[Qqwy]

@Crowdhailer

yes A data type for rational numbers. It would be best if in code divisions got put straight to this type. I believe clojure does this

3
# %Rational{numerator: 3, divisor:1}

2/3
# %Rational{numerator: 3, divisor:1}

Then a number protocol to get decimal values

Number.to_string(1 + 3/2, decimal_places: 2)
# 2.50
Number.to_string(1 + 2/3, decimal_places: 2)
# 1.67

As a protocol it would be extensible to other structs

Number.to_string(%SquareRoot{value: 2}, decimal_places: 2)
# 1.41
Number.to_string(%Pi{}, decimal_places: 2)
# 3.14

I think you will like Ratio, because it does much of this.

As for using symbolic math: The reason it is not used frequently in practice is that it is multiple orders of magnitude slower than using floating-point operations (which modern CPUs are very much optimized for), and for most computational problems, working with (matrices of) floats is ‘good enough ’.

Still, symbolic(/arbitrary precision) math certainly has its use cases. I did start writing something akin to a symbolic math engine in Elixir a while back (abusing the power of macros to read Elixir’s AST as symbolic formulas). But my mathematical skills are not something to write home about , so it is very much incomplete and probably bug-ridden.