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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.



bear scripsit:

> As for strings, pfah.  If you work in corpus linguistics it's not
> too uncommon to have literally millions of characters in a string.
> I'd really hate to see strings limited to 1023 characters.

Can you live with 2^24?

> >> Being error objects, syntax for NaNs should be unspecified.
> 
> >I don't see how that follows.
> 
> He means that NaNs should arise from error operations, not from
> the normal functioning of the reader.  If (read) returns an error
> object, it should mean that (read) encountered an error.

Since NaN is part of the prescribed behavior of IEEE floats, it is
not an error object in that sense; in particular there are operations
defined on NaN that do not produce NaN, notably the relational ones.

-- 
John Cowan  jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand
on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.
Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land,
to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
        --Thomas Henry Huxley