> (with-fixed-size-numbers-that-overflow-to-inexacts ...stuff...) Warning: I'm going to talk about jewels again. :-)
One of the beautiful things that has distinguished Scheme from other languages is that the Scheme user doesn't have to think about the limitations of physical computers, but can instead compute with mathematical numbers, leaving the representation issue to the Scheme implementor. The orthogonality of exactness with integerness is wonderful. I think this is why all the proposals to push representation onto the user are having underwhelming responses. Personally, I support Thomas Lord's repeated suggestion that bignum magnitude be limited to something well below the size of memory, raising an exception on overflow. The exception-catching mechanism that we should have in general would then allow programs to convert to flonum, crash, invent roll-your-own floating point, or whatever it wanted to do. That means everyone except astronomers and cryptographers can go on thinking of numbers as numbers. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
