On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 01:03:07PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote: > Okay, as has been suggested, the type order for numbers should go: > > int->bignum->float > > owing to the fact that floats are lossy and nasty. I'm not entirely > sure I agree, given that floats are supported in hardware and faster
> To recap the rest of the behaviors, basic math operations (addition, > subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulus) produce a result > that's of a type no tighter than the loosest type in the operation > (so int+bignum gets a bignum, but int+int will be an int if the > result fits, or a bignum if it doesn't), and error operations > (division by zero, overflow, or precision loss) throw an exception. I'm not sure that I agree, because for int,int operations (except division with a non-integer result) you can know if the result will fit in a float without loss. Nicholas Clark
