Brian Mastenbrook scripsit: > Using flonum arithmetic only would provide the same results for these > users.
Presumably that means all numbers are inexact, since there is nowhere to keep the exact/inexact bit. Unfortunately, RnRS is full of places that say "exact only". > One important difference between C & co and Scheme is that C integers > do not overflow to inexact numbers on any basic arithmetic operation. Granted. > On a tangential note, experience also suggests that 32-bit integers > are insufficient even on 32-bit hardware; most implementations of C > provide a 64-bit integer type for this reason, and it's commonly used > in library APIs for types like size_t. size_t doesn't need to be bigger than a pointer, but offset_t does (though we got along for many years with only 32-bit offsets). > If "numerical" implies "floating point", sure. It's quite possible to > do many useful numeric computations in such a Scheme, however, > including the number-theoretic operations used in many cryptographic > systems. Quite. The normal acceptation of "numerical", however, is computations about the analogue (or Real) world. > >Part of the reason for small Scheme is to allow such implementations > >to come out into the light, to claim conformance even though they > >are lacking quite a lot of IEEE/R4RS/R5RS. > > Should we do the same for implementations without unlimited-extent > reifiable continuations, proper tail calls, hygienic macros (or with > broken hygiene), etc.? No. However, none of those things have been mentioned in either RnRS explicitly or implicitly, or in the WG1 charter. -- John Cowan http://ccil.org/~cowan [email protected] Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. --Oscar Wilde _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
