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> From: bear <bear@xxxxxxxxx> >> On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, William D Clinger wrote: >> Secondly, the standardization of the fixnum/flonum base >> will improve the portability of programs that, for whatever >> reason, already use implementation-specific fixnum or flonum >> operations. > > Erf.... Aesthetics aside, yes, it *is* correct, if you're > going to have these modular-ring fx-foo and limited-precision > fl-foo operations, to make them different from general numeric > operations. This is because they are different operations > from the general numeric operations, and in some circumstances > give different answers. > ... - Upon more reflection, given that it's likely unreasonable to presume that an <exact> implementation must (or even could) reliably support infinitely precise calculations/representations, it must then support finite precision calculations, thereby necessitating its definition of overflow semantics, basically leaving the choice of either modular or saturating semantics; where either may be considered reasonable, it seems undisputed that modular semantics tend to be the simplest and most natural default of most machine and/or SW implementations, and does not preclude the throwing of a recoverable overflow exception if supported by the base implementation. (although believe exposing explicitly typed functions are unnecessary)