| From: Ray Dillinger <[email protected]> | Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:10:27 -0700 | | On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 23:16 +0100, David Rush wrote: | > 2009/9/28 Alaric Snell-Pym <[email protected]>: | > > On 28 Sep 2009, at 5:31 pm, John Cowan wrote: | | > >> 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. | | I think we have to look at dire failure conditions. And really, we | have to make a choice between some horrible ones here. | | With bignums limited by the size of machine memory, the dire | failure condition (particularly easy to hit with rationals) is that | the execution of your program consumes all memory and aborts or | crashes. The pernicious part is that the system may not even have | room to open a debugger to handle the abort.
That the program crashes is the result of poor coding practice. A single comparison operation in the subroutine which allocates a bignum can signal an informative exception with plenty of main memory available for the debugger. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
