| From: Brian Mastenbrook <[email protected]>
 | Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:58:43 -0500
 | 
 | On Sep 22, 2009, at 10:23 AM, John Cowan wrote:
 | 
 | > 2) Fixnums + flonums (limited range and precision types only)
 | >
 | > 5) Fixnums + flonums + compnums (2 with inexact complex numbers)
 | 
 | Can someone please explain to me why bignums are so onerous a  
 | requirement that implementations can't be expected to implement them?  
 | I'm not understanding why conses, vectors, strings, etc. can all be  
 | required, but bignums are problematic.

If all you had were bignums (no fixnums), or converted every fixnum to
a bignum before operating, then it wouldn't be so much work.  Coding
for every binary and nary argument mixture of numeric types bloats the
code.  Naive division, GCD, and LCD generate a lot of garbage.

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