On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Andrew Robbins <[email protected]> wrote:
> I vote against this proposal. > Here's why: the slippery slope. > > Why stop there? Why remove only complex notation, when you can get rid > of nasty rational notation too! In fact, we could add an entire new > class of syntax for all exact numbers at the same time! Instead of > X+Yi we would write #e(+ X (* Y (sqrt -1))) and instead of N/D we > would write #e(/ N D). Then we could add an extra precision argument > to exact->inexact and number->string so we could get a billion digits > of pi/2; I mean #e(/ (acos -1) 2). > > Pretty soon, you'll be requiring that every implementation include > libgmp, which many do in order to support rationals, but that's beside > the point. And in order to prevent people from including things like > user-defined functions and ports and if expressions, by requiring only > mathematical functions, you'd also end up with a new subsyntax which > is even more complex than complex notation. > > Regards, > Andrew Robbins > > I don't think you have to extend the argument to this level of absurdity before it breaks (although this did give me a laugh). 0 - complex number notation has been in Scheme and other languages for a while, and is pretty close to the mathematical notation used by most people. 1 - As Mr. Robbins pointed out, why support N/D notation when you could have #rat(N D) or #r(N D) as well, which would at least make the numeric types more consistent (if you were insisting on this sort of consistency at least). 2 - I don't think it really matters what the internal representation of a type is when we're not signalling intent or following a requirement like typed vectors do. 3 - Although the argument about reading the lexeme is a valid one, it does seem to be a barrier for entry to Scheme implementations (indeed, I fought with this too when working on my Scheme system, but I never thought it so complex as to require scraping it and starting over). Those are my 0.02 NOK anyway. Cheers, -- S. -- ==== Q. How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A. No.
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