Devon Schudy scripsit: > It should at least require some sort of well-behaved overflow. Bignums > are ideal, but throwing an exception is almost as good and easier to > implement. (But not overflowing to inexact, because it silently gives > incorrect results.)
Yes, but at least you can figure out they are incorrect. The -small standard allows any of these three results. If mandatory bignums fail to pass, I'll consider a ballot on flonum overflow vs. implementation restriction. > There are a lot of bignumless Schemes, so it would be nice to not make > trouble for them. On the other hand, bignums are Scheme's only escape > from small fixnums, and >30-bit integers are needed often enough that > they're maybe worth the trouble. Of the bignumless Schemes, only Chicken (fixnum/flonum), Stalin (fixnum/flonum), and Wraith (fixnum/ratnum/flonum/compnum) are (IMO) reasonable tools for traditional application development. (Embedded and mobile development is another story.) Note also that fixnums often go up to 2^60 these days. In particular, Wraith exists only in 64-bit form, which is why it's reasonable (again IMO) for it to support bignums but not ratnums. > (This isn't a vote; I don't think I use Scheme enough to get a vote. > My opinion is relevant only because I'm one of the marginal practical > users R7RS-large is aimed at, who might use Scheme more if it were > less painful.) All the more reason for you to vote, because that voice needs to be represented on WG2. So please do. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan [email protected] SAXParserFactory [is] a hideous, evil monstrosity of a class that should be hung, shot, beheaded, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, buried in unconsecrated ground, dug up, cremated, and the ashes tossed in the Tiber while the complete cast of Wicked sings "Ding dong, the witch is dead." --Elliotte Rusty Harold on xml-dev _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
