At Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:43:58 +0100, Jos Koot wrote: > Would we not have the same problem with 'rational?'. > All reals, both exact and inexact ones are rationals (for the obvious reason > that we cannot represent every irrational number in finite memory) > Would we not need the same distinction between 'exact-rational?' and > 'inexact-rational?'. May be 'rational?' should mean 'exact-rational?' and > 'real?' should mean 'inexact-real?' or 'inexact-rational?'.
I like that, it's consistent with exact-integer -> integer. > And how about exact and inexact 'complex?'? It's a bit more tricky, since there are potentially 4 kinds of complexes, each part could be exact or inexact. However, I'm not sure that complex numbers of the shape exact+inexact*i are of any use, and apart from the special case inexact+0i (inexact reals), I don't see much use for inexact+exact*i either. > I have the feeling that the numeric tower is tilting like that of Pisa. Sounds more like straightening it up to me. > When it comes to efficiency, flonums may be preferred, but it is not > difficult to enforce a function to do all its computations with flonums. It can be tricky if you mix exacts and inexacts, the result is not always inexact: (* 3.4 0) -> 0 ; not 0.0 Vincent _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev
