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On Wed, 18 May 2005, Bradley Lucier wrote: >1. I believe that every numerical value should have an external >representation. There are many different NaNs (the only requirement >is that the biased exponent field should be a maximum and the >mantissa field be nonzero), so it should be possible to specify or >determine this information about a NaN from its external representation. This is reasonable SRFI material; if widely implemented, it is likely to become standard. >2. If Scheme really wants to get serious about floating-point >arithmetic, one should be able to specify the precision of floating- >point operations. "One-precision-fits-all" doesn't cut it for >serious code. I agree, but I would prefer that numeric precision be part of numeric representation, (and syntax) and have all operations return a result of the same precision as the least precise argument. The exponent markers S, F, E, D, and L are not sufficiently general, and IMO present the information in the wrong part of the number; to me, "precision" is a set of values denoting different varieties of "inexact", and therefore I would like to see it combined with the "inexact" prefix somehow. Bear