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Re: reading NaNs Alan Watson 24 Oct 2005 20:35 UTC

Alan Watson wrote:
> But "atomic" I don't mean "not a pair". I not quite sure how to define
> it, but perhaps "something that can be finitely enumerated" gets close.
> Perhaps "atomic" is not the best name for this property.
>
> Anyway, this property is shared by chars, fixnums, flonums, null, EOF
> objects. These (with the understandable exception of EOF) have standard
> read syntax. By extension, the bignums and derivaties, while not finite,
> also have a read syntax.
>
> Anyway, NaNs clearly share this property, so I would suggest they have a
> read syntax.

Hmm. Perhaps the property I am looking for that of is objects which are
eqv? according to their *value* not their *location*. This includes
booleans, characters, numbers, nulls, and symbols. All of these have
read syntax.

Regards,

Alan
--
Dr Alan Watson
Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica
Universidad Astronómico Nacional de México