Inexact integers Lassi Kortela (18 Nov 2019 12:18 UTC)
Re: Inexact integers John Cowan (18 Nov 2019 14:57 UTC)
Re: Inexact integers Lassi Kortela (18 Nov 2019 17:57 UTC)
Re: Inexact integers John Cowan (18 Nov 2019 18:22 UTC)
Re: Inexact integers Lassi Kortela (18 Nov 2019 18:43 UTC)
Re: Inexact integers Lassi Kortela (18 Nov 2019 18:58 UTC)

Re: Inexact integers Lassi Kortela 18 Nov 2019 17:57 UTC

> An inexact integer is just an inexact number that happens to have an
> integral value (like 12.0), so there's nothing wrong with that.  In
> principle, inexact numbers don't have to be floats (they could be, say
> decimal numbers with 10 integral digits and 3 fractional digits), but
> the whole reason inexact numbers exist in Scheme is efficiency (exact
> arithmetic can get very slow if you do a lot of divisions).  So since
> floats are provided in all modern hardware, Scheme models that.

I thought there was something more complex going on in pre-R6RS Scheme
standards, as discussed in
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10935110/meaning-of-in-scheme-number-literals/>.
That page shows some integers where the integer part has ## unknown
digit markers.

It's probably pedantic to be clearing this up nowadays, but I thought to
err on the safe side and ask.