Brian Mastenbrook scripsit:

> Can you point to another example of a dynamically-typed language that
> allows implementations to set a (very small) bound on the largest
> representable exact integer, and also provides the exact -> inexact
> overflow semantics of Scheme?  I'm not thinking of anything off the
> top of my head. 

I can't think of anything offhand either.  There are really only four
possibilities for incalculable or unrepresentable results in exact
arithmetic: return the right answer (Scheme with bignums), return an
inexact answer (Scheme without bignums), return a wrong answer (wrapping
semantics), or return a special token (as IEEE floats do).

> What I'm suggesting is that a program should be able to explicitly  
> request overflow-error semantics even on an implementation which  
> normally implements exact -> inexact overflow. 

That doesn't seem unreasonable.

-- 
Principles.  You can't say A is         John Cowan <[email protected]>
made of B or vice versa.  All mass      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
is interaction.  --Richard Feynman

_______________________________________________
r6rs-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss

Reply via email to