Brian Harvey scripsit: > Yes, this /does/ make me feel queasy about the numeric tower. WG1 /should/ > make it clear that if you have both reals and integers then (= 3 3.0) must > return true. But I'm willing to be meta-inconsistent about this (by which > I mean that I'm okay with an inconsistency in the charter, but not about an > inconsistency in Scheme).
R6RS (and I presume large Scheme) mandates the whole tower. Should small Scheme? I don't know. My thoughts, which don't amount to a proposal yet, are that fixnum-only Schemes are just toys, and that the following types are reasonable alternatives for a small Scheme: 1) Fixnums + bignums (exact integers only) 2) Fixnums + flonums (limited range and precision types only) 3) Fixnums + bignums + flonums 4) 3 + ratios (all numbers are real) 5) Fixnums + flonums + compnums (2 with inexact complex numbers) 6) The whole tower I have provided the feature groups %bignums, %inexact, %ratios, and %complex to express these ideas. (See http://larceny.ccs.neu.edu/doc/LarcenyNotes/note3-arithmetic.html for definitions of the above jargon. Chicken uses it too, and subsets of it have been current for a long time.) -- Clear? Huh! Why a four-year-old child John Cowan could understand this report. Run out [email protected] and find me a four-year-old child. I http://www.ccil.org/~cowan can't make head or tail out of it. --Rufus T. Firefly on government reports _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
