Bignums are nice and all, but I hardly see it as a practical necessity. Plus if I had to choose between fix/flonums or bignums and slower number performance, I'd choose the prior, that is why I use chicken!
Indy On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 10:39 PM, John Cowan <[email protected]> wrote: > Kon Lovett scripsit: > > > I am not defending the lack of bignums in Chicken. Just trying to > > understand the need. > > I think at this point it's about what people expect from a Scheme. > Of the pre-R6RS implementations I tested, all of PLT, Gauche, MIT Scheme, > Gambit, Bigloo, Scheme48/scsh, Guile, Kawa, SISC, Chez, SCM, STklos, > and even tiny Chibi provide bignums. In effect, bignums have become > part of what a Scheme is. Most of these systems limit bignums in one > way or another to a size far less than all of memory, but all of them > AFAIK handle numbers up to at least 2^(2^15). > > Scraping the bottom of the implementation barrel, SigScheme has 28-bit > fixnums and signals an error if you overflow them; however, bignum > literals are interpreted as flonums. SXM and S7, which are extremely > minimal, wrap at 31 bits and 64 bits respectively, which is not even > R5RS-conformant; SXM actually crashes if it reads a bignum literal. > > Chicken and only Chicken converts fixnum operations to flonums on > overflow. This behavior is certainly licensed by R5RS, but it doesn't > fit very well into the Scheme ecology. The numbers egg just isn't a > substitute for bignums in the core (and particularly in the FFI). > > -- > Normally I can handle panic attacks on my own; John Cowan < > [email protected]> > but panic is, at the moment, a way of life. > http://www.ccil.org/~cowan > > > _______________________________________________ > Chicken-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users >
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