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.
William D Clinger wrote:
Would the following proposal satisfy your goals: (a) Mandate unlimited size exact integers in the base language. (b) Push fl+ et al. off into a library module.No. The fundamental problem with R5RS arithmetic is that programmers cannot rely on the behavior of the arithmetic primitives. Mandating exact integers of unlimited size would help, but programmers would still not know whether (/ 3 4) will evaluate to 3/4, 0, 1, or 0.75. To solve this problem, we have to require some subset of the tower that has reasonable closure properties, while banishing any arithmetic operations that are not closed over that subset. We have to do both.
I agree. I would propose that the arithmetic procedures in the base language be closed over exact integers of unlimited size; that is, I would banish / and other procedures that are not closed. (Or, maybe, force them to signal an error, if a suitable error handling mechanism is defined.) Programmers would then know exactly (sic) the result of all arithmetic operations in the base language.
Then, I would either mandate the full tower in the library or mandate SRFI-77 flonum operations in the library. These give the programmer the full tower, either directly or by using (a modified version of) your portable code.
I understand this is postulating some means to push the SRFI-77 operations off into a library, but I don't see the problem. I am not proposing that SRFI-83 implement a general means to import different languages.
In my opinion, two fairly extreme positions are the most attractive. Either require the full tower as part of the base language, or require only the fixnum/flonum foundation while banishing + and the other generic operations to the libraries.
I think the major difference between us on this issue is that you think that modular fixnum arithmetic is adequate for the base language whereas I do not. I want exact integers of unlimited size because I can see an argument[*] for making fixnums smaller than the size needed to reference the largest possible list, string, or vector, and I cannot imagine the base language not completely defining these operations.
I also like the idea of the arithmetic operations following standard arithmetic rather than modular arithmetic.
Regards, Alan[*] For example, making fixnums 16-bits wide on a 32-bit machine to allow for quick determination of overflow on multiplication.
-- Dr Alan Watson Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica Universidad Astronómico Nacional de México