Re: four issues for R5RS meeting at Xerox PARC

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

On Tue, 19 May 92 00:35:09 -0400, Aubrey Jaffer <jaffer@martigny.ai.mit.edu> said:

> SCM used to signal an error for (/ 5 3) which caused no end of
> complaints from users.  In a system without rational numbers the only
> other possibility I read R4RS as allowing is an integer.

Why not "silently coerce its result to an inexact number"?  That's
what I'd what an implementation to do if it supported floating point
numbers and integers but not rationals.  I certainly wouldn't want it
to return 1 - if I wanted that, I'd call 'quotient' instead of '/'.
Heck, I'd probably prefer 2 to 1 as a result - it's closer to the
truth.

david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu