Integers are real numbers. Perhaps they are arguing with imaginary programmers.

I think this is a reference to an old joke about "God is Real, unless declared as Integer" since in Pascal Real and Integer are data types.

The joke is actually about FORTRAN, where variables don't have to be declared, and is implicitly declared as Integer if it's first letter is in the range I-N and otherwise implicitly declared as the type Real (usually 32-bit floating point). Thus the variable GOD will implicitly be of type real.

Pascal have the same type names, but does not allow implicit declarations.

Oh, interesting. I suspected it might be from an older language, but i expected Algol, not FORTRAN :-P.

Personally i associate it with Pascal because i first saw it on an IRC channel's topic back in the mid-90s :-).

If it's a stupid programming joke, you can probably blame it on FORTRAN. COBOL programmers don't have senses of humor.

Actually, integers are a subset of the real numbers. I think you mean complex numbers with a non-zero imaginary component.

In Pascal Real’s aren’t necessarily a superset of Integer’s (both can be four bytes, with, for example, 2^30+1 representable as an Integer, but not as a Real)

I'm so used to talking data types I forgot in math you're absolutely correct!

Cooncidentally in Pascal, real and integer are the names of two numeric data types.

That's good to know! I was born after Pascal's peak, so I've never used it, so I wasn't aware that I was wrong in a sense :D

They are using English.