On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Bradd W. Szonye wrote:

>Just FYI, a little more background on Scheme's exponent markers:

<clip>

Okay, this does make sense;  A 32bit float minus three bits
for typetags though, is painfully coarse, but good enough for
some types of applications.

The more I think about it, the more I see these exponent markers as
modifying the inexact prefix; In a perfect world, I'd prefer to banish
them from the exponent marker alltogether and use #is, #if, #id, #il
as inexactness prefixes for short, float, double, and long.

We do not live in a perfect world.  Such a change would cause a flag
day for all existing code.  Let's not do it.

			Bear