On Mon, 2014-04-28 at 23:48 -0400, John Cowan wrote: > 1) Should R7RS-large require arbitrarily large (up to implementation > restrictions like memory) exact integers?
It should require exact integers. It should encourage range limits much higher than typical programming languages. It should not require an implementation to exhaust all memory and crash in an attempt to represent a very large exact integer. > 2) Should R7RS-large require support for exact rational numbers? It should require exact ratios. It should not require an implementation to exhaust all memory and crash in an attempt to represent a very precise ratio. > 3) Should R7RS-large require support for exact complex numbers? Previously I voted 'yes' subject to the same representation limits as other exact numbers. But as I consider this there's an issue. I would vote 'yes' for consistency with the rest of the numeric tower, but it is hard to say exactly what a 'yes' here means in the absence of any constraint on whether the exact numbers represented are, eg, stored in polar or cartesian format, or in some union that could be either, and if in polar format whether the angle measurement is given in radians (either directly or as some product of pi like degrees), or as a slope ratio. Working with a set of exact numbers means to me that you should be able to know what set of operations preserve or do not preserve that property to the limits of representation, but depending on what schema is chosen to represent complex numbers, the sets of exactness preserving operations are different and the sets of exactly representable numbers are not related to each other in any simple way. > 4) Should R7RS-large require inexact complex numbers? Yes. _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
