On Wed, 18 May 2005, Bradley Lucier wrote:

>1.  I believe that every numerical value should have an external
>representation.  There are many different NaNs (the only requirement
>is that the biased exponent field should be a maximum and the
>mantissa field be nonzero), so it should be possible to specify or
>determine this information about a NaN from its external representation.

This is reasonable SRFI material; if widely implemented, it is
likely to become standard.

>2.  If Scheme really wants to get serious about floating-point
>arithmetic, one should be able to specify the precision of floating-
>point operations.  "One-precision-fits-all" doesn't cut it for
>serious code.

I agree, but I would prefer that numeric precision be part of
numeric representation, (and syntax) and have all operations
return a result of the same precision as the least precise
argument.  The exponent markers S, F, E, D, and L are not
sufficiently general, and IMO present the information in the
wrong part of the number; to me, "precision" is a set of
values denoting different varieties of "inexact", and therefore
I would like to see it combined with the "inexact" prefix somehow.

				Bear