On 29-Sep-09, at 12:50 PM, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote: >> >> 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. > > That'd be reasonable, as long as "s/something well below the size of > memory/some implementation-specified maximum/". I don't care if some > implementation sets that bar at +/-128, as long as it says so on the > box so that people can know this system isn't good at numbers (but is > a lovely way of programming an 8-bit microcontroller in Scheme ;-)
Let me add that the PICOBIT Scheme compiler and virtual machine were designed to program 8-bit microcontrollers and they support bignums. Even so, the virtual machine fits in less than 20 kB (on a PIC18 microcontroller). Bignums are not incompatible with microcontrollers. Marc _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
