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Re: Should logior (and friends) operate only on inums?


Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@alum.mit.edu> writes:

> 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.

Sure, sounds reasonable to me.  Since it's not a bug I introduced, it's
on the back burner for me... I've other more pressing contributions.
This should be in a TODO file, or add the FIXME conventions from Scwm
and mark up the source to remind us to do that.

Greg

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