[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: arithmetic issues

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 77 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 77 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>>> It is an explanation of why your appeal to tradition is ill-founded;
>>> the tradition actually points the opposite way.
>>
>> There is no tradition in not providing a read syntax for "error
>> objects".
>
> Really?  Can you give me some pointers to the Lisp systems which do
> provide read syntax for all the error objects they have?

Could you show an object which does not have read syntax in Lisp
*because* it's an error object?

Common Lisp condition objects, if you mean them. are not comparable to
NaN. A condition is caught out of band; a NaN is returned instead of
a more exact result and gets printed along with the normal way of
printing results.

When one part of the program prints numeric results to a file, and
another part later reads them, what is the point in breaking this
communication channel for NaNs?

Sigh. With this attitude I have no hope in getting a decent portable
numeric system from Scheme. Implementations are on their own. Time to
move to more sane languages.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/