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

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow at alum dot mit dot edu>]

"Greg J. Badros" wrote:
> 
> Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:
> 
> > "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.
> 
> Cute.  :-) I don't feel strongly about this, but in my dream
> interpreter, all support for bignums would be an extension, since I've
> never used them.

Scwm's fvwm module support depends on the fact that all values up to
the size of an unsigned long can be represented as a Scheme number.
This requires bignum support because immediate numbers can only hold
30 bits, due to the need for a type tag.

So you're wrong, you've used them without even knowing it. That's
what's so nice about bignums. :-)

 - Maciej