[r6rs-discuss] Proposed features for small Scheme, part 9: modules

[John Cowan]

Brian Harvey scripsit:

> I remember the discussion that led to this conclusion, but it remains
> extremely counterintuitive to me, and I'm betting to most Scheme users.
> "Bignums" means that (factorial 100) has an exact answer.  

Or, more to the point, that (/ (factorial 100) (factorial 99) has an
exact answer.

> an implementation that errors at 2^31 "has bignums."  Nah.

That just shows that the feature groups are badly named, which I concede,
not that the concepts are wrong.  There's a real difference in behavior here.

> Anyway, this (what to do on overflow) might well be something the user
> would like to /set/, as in 
> 
> 	(set! auto-convert-to-float #f)

Hmm.  That does sound more plausible, actually.  I'll think about it.
It should probably be a SRFI-39 parameter.

-- 
In politics, obedience and support      John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>
are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan