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Re: Should logior (and friends) operate only on inums?
Marius Vollmer wrote:
>
> "Greg J. Badros" <gjb@cs.washington.edu> writes:
>
> > It's a tough call; I think of some weighting between amount of code
> > that its add relative to its general utility.
>
> I don't think so. If you have code for doing bignum bit twiddling it
> should definitely be in the core. It is not totally urgent to fix it
> but it is still a bug not to support bignums. Anything else would
> earn a golden `8.3' award, in my opinion.
I have to agree with Marius. Can you imagine the confusion of having to
load one module for bit-twiddling operations, another for bit twiddling
operations that work on bignums, another for arithmetic on bignums, etc?
One of Scheme's advantages is that it hides you from having to care how
many bits are in your number, even if the machine cares.
Mathematical operations should (in theory) support all of the numeric
tower for which they have a natural interpretation.
Admittedly, this is not the world's most important bug, but it is a bug
nontheless.
- Maciej