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Re: infinities reformulated

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 70 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 70 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



 | From: Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@xxxxxxxxxx>
 | Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2005 08:23:36 -0700
 | 
 | Aubrey Jaffer <agj@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
 | 
 | > So in a Scheme implementation which has "arbitrarily big" precision,
 | > how many digits is (sqrt 2)?  How many digits is (sin 7/5)?
 | 
 | There is no function "precision-of", so there is no need for an
 | answer.  Arbitrarily big precision arithmetic (generally) works pretty
 | well; you carry around symbolic representations and operate on them.

To first order:

  (define (precision-of x) (string-length (number->string x)))

R5RS requires all numbers to have external representations; and it
specifies the allowed formats.