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Re: My comments

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.



"Bradd W. Szonye" <bradd+srfi@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> B. quotient remainder modulo
>
> But where's the problem here?

The opposite: the R5RS domain is too narrow.

This leaves no standard Scheme functions whose domain should be based
on exact and inexact integers, or on exact and inexact rationals.
Either the domain should include only exact integers, or only exact
rationals, or it can cover all reals (except some boundary regions).

> Consider the per capita income of the USA in whole dollars, which is
> the quotient of two inexact integers.

Integerness doesn't matter here. In practice it's treated as a real
number, a quotient of two reals, because the accuracy of both the
dividend and the divisor is worse than 1 unit. It's impractical to ask
for the greatest common divisor of these two "integers" for example.

Same for the Avogadro number. In the idealized world it could be an
integer with an unknown value, but for all practical purposes it's
a real number, approximated with an integer which is divisible by
a huge power of 10.

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