Re: Common Lisp solved this problem 20 years ago
Alan Watson 25 Oct 2005 20:27 UTC
Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
> Declaring types of identifiers is not enough, because it can't express
> the wish to ignore any fixnum overflow and assume that the result will
> fit in a fixnum.
The C world has recently woken up to the problem of integer overflow. I
used to think, "hah, if only they had used Scheme". Now we are proposing
to include this problem in the *core* of Scheme.
Look, the core of Scheme should favor correctness over efficiency. The
core of scheme should define addition on two integers to yield the sum,
not the sum modulus some unknown constant.
Yes, fixnum modular arithmetic can be useful in some circumstances. But,
please, shunt it off into the library.
Regards,
Alan
--
Dr Alan Watson
Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica
Universidad Astronómico Nacional de México