Alaric Snell-Pym scripsit: > I have a great interest in being able to obtain exact answers for the > sizes of files, and many of them are many GB in size... indeed, in > Ugarit (my Venti-esque backup/archival system), the backend opens a > new backup file every GB, as even with the numbers egg loaded, > Chicken's procedure to find the position of a port in a file starts > returning flonums beyond 2^30; and I need to record the current > position in the file to update an index of what block is where :-(
Yes, that's one of the annoyances of the numbers egg: it doesn't affect code that wasn't compiled with it, and the Posix unit wasn't. But unless your file is more than 8 petabytes long, the flonum should work just fine. It's true that currently file-set-position! pukes on flonums; I just reported that to chicken-users. > 2) I really think that exact integers should stay that way up to some > implementation-specified limit, and then they should raise overflow > conditions, the handlers of which can then opt to make the arithmetic > operation return some arbitrary value of their choosing. Ooh, so now everyone's going to have to have *overflow handlers* just because it's *too awful* to do what R5RS specifically allows. Really. > 4) fixnum/bignum is a side issue that confuses matters. That's just an > issue of representation. Saying a given Scheme "has bignums" or not > isn't the issue, so I question John's approach to having a feature > called %bignums. The issue is how big exact integers can get before > something happens, and then what happens. +1. +%bignums really means "report an error when the numbers get too big". -- Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the John Cowan portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see [email protected] it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, http://ccil.org/~cowan epical or dramatic? If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not? --Stephen Dedalus _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
