2009/9/28 Alaric Snell-Pym <[email protected]>: > > On 28 Sep 2009, at 5:31 pm, John Cowan wrote: >> That strikes me as over-specification. Most people in other languages >> don't worry much about the range of the largest kind of fixnums they >> have,
That's generally because they are either lazy or sloppy. Very few people I have ever met bother with range analysis. And at my current company we had to scramble when A client wanted our system to handle a couple of orders of magnitude more transactions than our design point and we realized that we'd run out of ids in 90 days. It's CRUCIAL information. That's why C has the limits.h header. Scheme *needs* the analogy for it's numeric tower otherwise it is difficult to write code with predictable accuracy and performance. >> and it should not be a requirement that Scheme implementations signal >> an error on fixnum overflow -- returning an inexact result should >> still be fine. That gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. It really does. > 2) (as an SRFI) implementations may provide special sets of numerical > operations with prefixes - fx+ fx- etc - that have special semantics: Please no. It is far simpler to just provide the O(1) limiting size. If inexacts are good enough for overflow they're good enough for the entire computation. david -- GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
