Re: [Chicken-users] Re: Bignums in core

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

So what you're saying is, who cares about doing the right thing, let's
just do anything at all now.

Well, my preference is to do the right thing.  What are you going to do
when the inexactness bites you?

On Sat, 2009-10-03 at 23:11 -0700, Nicholas "Indy" Ray wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:10 PM, Thomas Bushnell BSG <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>         There's no need to implement everything at once...
>         
>         In this case, I'm saying that rather than accept the *wrong*
>         argument
>         (inexact integers), we have a need for larger exact integers
>         than we can
>         support at present, and the right thing to do is add larger
>         exact
>         integers, not allow a function which should accept only exact
>         integers
>          to start taking inexact ones.
> 
> 
> This is a dynamic and pragmatic language. If we were going for a
> type-safe statically compiled language I'd tend to agree. But in a
> dynamic language, this simple fix will allow problems to be solved
> (dealing with large files) in a fast (both in performance, and in time
> to get in the compiler) with little lost, and only in idealism.
> 
> 
> Indy
>