On 4/27/07, Alan Isaac <aisaac@american.edu> wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:
Then again, doubles aren't a group either because of this imprecision, and I'm suggesting claiming they're a subclass of that, so maybe there's room in a practical language to make them a subclass of the rationals too.
Would using language from the Scheme report be useful when discussing this? http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/scheme/documentation/scheme_5.html
Very much so. Thanks for sending the link. I'm not going to get a chance to update the document for the next several days, so if you want to put together a patch using such language, I'd be happy to see it go in. Or I'll integrate those ideas once I have a bit more spare time. It looks like the primary ideas there are that it was worthwhile for Scheme to have the full Number:>Complex:>Real:>Rational:>Integer tower, and that it wasn't worthwhile to duplicate it entirely for the exact/inexact distinction. Thanks, Jeffrey