On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Thomas Bushnell BSG <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The point here is that it is patently obvious that in fact you *do* need > larger exact integers than Chicken Scheme supports at present. Having > inexact integers be used is, in my opinion, as wrong as accepting > eight-byte blobs and using those as 64 bit integers. > I'm also not against eight-byte blobs for 64 bit integers in principle, But as it turns out, flonums are a much more convenient representation. On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:21 PM, Thomas Bushnell BSG <[email protected]> wrote: > So what you're saying is, who cares about doing the right thing, let's > just do anything at all now. > > In this case, using flonums gives a temporary solution to the problem, and should also be easy to remove later on when we get higher range integers. This is not an abstract "right thing" vs "anything at all now" philosophical argument as both the right thing and the alternative are real tangible things. > Well, my preference is to do the right thing. What are you going to do > when the inexactness bites you? I'm sorry but the discussion hasn't discussed the ways the inexactness may bite. It seems to be a very controlled edge-case that can be avoided by simply not dealing with large files and inexact numbers. Regardless many other details of chicken scheme (most are related to the spec more then the implementation) tend to "bite" I find the problem and work around it. That's what we do as programmers trying to get work done. On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Thomas Bushnell BSG <[email protected]> wrote: > Huh? The point is that if the user wants (set-file-position > (inexact->exact n)) they should say so, and not have the system > magically coerce something which needs to be an exact integer. Sorry, I don't understand this comment, if they were to do that, set-file-position! should receive an exact number, and handle it just fine. Nicholas "Indy" Ray
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