Re: four issues for R5RS meeting at Xerox PARC

[david carlton <carlton@husc.harvard.edu>]

On Sun, 17 May 92 14:24:59 -0400, Aubrey Jaffer <jaffer@martigny.ai.mit.edu> said:

>  <3>
> Similarly, I would like the transcendental functions EXP, LOG, SIN,
> COS, TAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN, MAKE-RECTANGULAR, MAKE-POLAR, and ANGLE
> not be required to accept exact arguments.  When I take SIN of an
> exact number it is because I forgot to multiply it times pi.  I would
> appreciate Scheme catching this error for me.  I expect this is true
> in the vast majority of cases.  EXACT->INEXACT is always availble for
> the one in a million program which actually wants (SIN 1).

I don't like this too much.  I can imagine an exact 0 being the
argument of a call to SIN, which I think should be allowed.  Also,
there's nothing that says that exact numbers can't include, say,
multiples of pi; even though (as far as I know) no implementations
currently do that, I wouldn't like to do things like the above which
discourage their doing that.

david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu

       I used to be a FUNDAMENTALIST, but then I heard about the HIGH
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