Re: [PATCH] Handle products with exact 0 differently, etc

[Mark H Weaver]

>> Subject: [PATCH] Trigonometric functions return exact numbers in some
>> cases
>
> Why would you want this?

I'm a developer of Maxima, a free CAS (computer algebra system).  I'm
interested in building a free CAS on top of Guile, probably with large
chunks of functionality adapted from Maxima.  As part of this, I would
like it to return exact results whenever feasible.  If the argument
passed to a trig function is a symbolic expression, that will
automatically be handled by GOOPS methods for the various operators.
However, there are a few exceptions where trig functions applied to
simple numbers will never reach GOOPS.  I'd like to do the right thing
in those cases.

Note that this is also the motivation behind my interest in bigfloats,
and in making sure that the numeric code is fully extensible.

     Best,
      Mark