Fraction equality and Float infinity problem

nicolas cellier ncellier at ifrance.com
Sun Apr 2 14:43:29 UTC 2006


Thanks for this interesting link.
I see we share same problems indeed, and maybe your reflexion is more advanced 
on the subject.

I do not think Smalltalkers are ready for duplicated arithmetic operators 
(float vs fix, exact vs inexact), they would rather prefer an explicit 
conversion. So maybe we won't share all our respective solutions, but we may 
at least for the generic arithmetic part.

As an interesting example, i never answered the question for complex with null 
imaginary part: should i keep the result complex or convert it to real ? 
Squeak keep it complex, visualworks convert it. The exact/inexact case you 
distinguish sounds a good proposition to me. But things are not so obvious...
For example (* (1.0+0i) (1.0+0i) ) might well answer false to real? , unless 
(* 1.0 0) result in an exact zero (what it should do if you think of it).

Nicolas

Le Jeudi 30 Mars 2006 18:52, Dave Mason a écrit :
> The Scheme community has a process called SRFIs which models on IETF
> RFCs to explore models and extensions to the standard language (I was
> one of the founding editors of SRFIs).  Although Scheme is not (usually)
> OO, it is dynamically typed and has many of the same issues as
> Smalltalk.
>
> In particular, they have recently been discussing many of these issues
> as part of SRFI-77, at:
>      http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-77/
>
> In the Document, look at the Issues under the Design Rationalle section.
>
> You may also find much of the archived discussion relevant.
>
> ../Dave




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