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Re: Common Lisp solved this problem 20 years ago

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.



I'm a bit unclear on one part of your proposal: is the type
declaration syntax merely a suggestion to the compiler, or does it
actually affect the semantics of a program?  That is, if I specify
that an expression's value is an IEEE double-precision flonum, do
arithmetic operations in that context 'become' IEEE 64-bit flonum
operations, with roundoff &c. as specified by IEEE, or may the system
actually do something else?  Would this be the case with the integer
declarations and n-bit modular arithmetic as well?

While type declarations are useful (though I *abhor* the :: syntax),
limiting declarations solely to types, I think, is not, and they do
not usefully subsume semantic distinctions, which may go deeper than
simply coercing values here & there, and which should be provided in
the form of different procedures with different semantics; e.g., the
(MODULAR-ADDER n) &c. procedures I suggested earlier.  Declarations
are useful to have, such as (DECLARE ARRAY-INDEX FOO BAR-ARRAY), but
I think they are really out of the scope of this SRFI.