Re: arithmetic issues

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Schlie <schlie@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> - Personally, it seems reasonable to require that a base implementation
>   support only finite modular integers with a precision sufficient to
>   represent the larger of:
>   
>   (integer-range) => <max-positive-representable-integer> or
>
>   (length <list-of-all-allocatable-elements-for-a-given-implementation>)

My toy Scheme interpreter is hosted by a language with native bignums,
and no distinction between fixnums and bignums in the public API.
A requirement to support modular arithmetic would be inconvenient here.

(Actually the hosting language does have some unsafe fixnum-only
operations, but I'm not sure whether to treat them as public.)

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