At Sat, 22 May 2010 17:52:19 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote: > On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Robby Findler > <ro...@eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote: > > On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 9:32 PM, David Van Horn <dvanh...@ccs.neu.edu> > > wrote: > >> I talked with the PLTers who attended TFP and it was agreed that inexact > >> integers, a holdover from Scheme standards, are counter intuitive. I > >> wonder > >> if it is worth doing away with them in Racket? > > > > Maybe in a later release. But the design of the number hierarchy is > > complex so if we were to contemplate such a thing, the proposal would > > probably have to be more concrete. (After all, we dno't want to do > > away with something float-like completely, for performance reasons.) > > First, the change to racket is a new language, and thus an opportunity > for things to be different. Future releases won't have this > opportunity.
Our experience evolving "PLT Scheme" suggests otherwise. > Second, here's a concrete proposal: in `racket/base' and all derived > languages, `integer?' means what `exact-integer?' means in > `scheme/base'. `scheme' and `scheme/base' stay the same. No other > changes are made to the number hierarchy. I think it will take more than a couple of `rename-out's in `provide' forms. Error messages from primitives, for example, embed the "integer" and "exact integer" terminology. It's a good idea, but it will take some time to experiment and iron out the kinks, so it's not a good candidate for a v5.0 change. (At this point, of course, practically nothing is a good candidate for a v5.0 change.) _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
