"John.Cowan" <xxxxxx@reutershealth.com> writes:

> Thomas Bushnell BSG scripsit:
>
>> How about the user expects that, if he has requested an
>> IEEE-conformant environment, he will get it?
>
> Could you explain the concrete benefits of having a flonum system
> available which is non-IIEEE?  (Fast execution on processors which
> provide hardware flonums that are non-IEEE, now extremely rare, excepted.)

Well, there's those hardware options, of course. :)

I, for one, am not confident that IEEE arithmetic is perfect.  I am
very confident that the experts who designed that standard will
someday need a new one.

I would like to standardize Scheme's use in such a way that the
language doesn't need to fundamentally change anytime such a change
happens.

Thomas