[Chicken-users] SWIG Policy Question

[John Lenz]

A test was recently added to the SWIG test suite that checks if overflows
are correctly detected.  It was added for guile, which allows arbitrarily
big integers, so a check if the integer is inside the range of a long is
possible.  Since the scheme languages in SWIG share a lot of code, the
test was added for chicken as well.  But the test currently fails, and I
am wondering how to proceed.

Currently, SWIG chicken accepts either a fixnum or a flonum to any integer
parameter, and does no checking at all for overflow.  (It uses
C_num_to_int to convert.  Thus, a direct cast from int to double.)

The question is, which types (if any) should SWIG check for overflow? 
Testing for the double/flonum -> long overflows could be made, using
something like
double arg1d = C_flonum_magnitude(scm1);
if ((double)C_WORD_MIN > arg1d || (double)C_WORD_MAX < arg1d)
  SWIG_Chicken_Barf(...)
int arg1 = (int) arg1d;

Also, casts from fixnums to shorts could also be checked for overflow. 
Casts from fixnums to ints or longs would not check for overflow... since
any overflow chicken would convert to a flonum.

Or, we could skip overflow detection and leave the code like it is right
now.  In that case, I would remove the tests for overflow from the chicken
portion of the test suite.

John

PS: I recently commited some changes to configure.in to no longer check
chicken-config and use csc instead.