Re: IEEE floating point support for guile?

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Nov-2000, Jim Blandy <address@hidden> wrote:

| 
| > The current CVS guile does not seem to support IEEE floating point
| > arithmetic.  Has this topic been discussed before?  Is there any
| > interest in adding support for this to guile?
| 
| Yes, there is interest.  What changes would be necessary?

Things like (/ 1 0) or (* 1e200 1e200) should produce Inf, (/ 0 0)
should produce NaNs, these sorts of operations should be (optionally)
raise exceptions, we should be able to test for Inf (isinf x) and NaN
(isnan x), etc. (though maybe the spelling of isinf and isnan should
be inf? and nan?).  Control over what exceptions are raised is system
dependent, but that's what configure is for.  Octave has some tests
for simple things like isinf and isnan, and the GSL provides some code
for controlling exceptions.

Recently, there was a discussion on comp.lang.python about similar
changes for Python.  There may be some ideas there, but the discussion
soon mutated into a discussion of whether (/ 1 2) should produce 0 or
0.5.  BTW, I prefer 0.5 (or 1/2), but is there a way in guile to perform
integer division?

jwe