On Tue, 2009-09-22 at 21:15 -0700, Brian Harvey wrote:
> > Honestly, I think most of the practical problems with bignums would be
> > solved if there were no automatic coercion between 'big' and
> > 'fixed-size' numeric representations.
>
> This would be okay with me as long as we redefine "fixnum" to mean "numbers
> whose magnitude is less than or equal to 100 factorial." :-) I would really
> hate to lose that demo in lecture.
Would you be unhappy if there were a distinguished syntax for "bignum"
values in the fixnum range, where fixnums overflow to inexact and
bignums yield bignum results? For example if
;; overflow to inexact for a non-bignum 100
(exponential 100) ==> 9.332621544394415268169923885626670049E157
;; require a bignum result for a bignum 100 (using #L for "large"
;; as a bignum prefix because #b is taken for binary...)
(exponential +#L100) ==>
93326215443944152681699238856266700490715968264381621468592963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223758251185210916864000000000000000000000000
Because this is what I actually want, especially for ratios.
Alternatively, 157 decimal digits ~= 240 bits
Bear
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