[Ecls-list] Re: Decimal Numbers

[Marco Antoniotti]

On Aug 19, 2005, at 3:16 AM, GP lisper wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:16:26 -0400, <marcoxa at cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> It is not a question of "within your reach" or not.  Floats are in the
>> ANSI spec, you cannot remove them and still have a Common Lisp.
>
> Oh, hadn't considered that.  But then I was listening to J. McCarthy
> when he was complaining that the creation of the ANSI spec destroyed
> the experimental side of lisp.

I do not give that much credit to such arguments, even if they come 
form McCarthy (whose namesake is well earned, on the side :) ).

I apologize for sounding sanctimonius, but you can experiment with 
Common Lisp as much as you want.  TRW to do this is to create your own 
package which defines the decimal arithmetic.  Once you have it and you 
have the #D syntax in place and much accepted, then you (we) can start 
a campaign to have the various implementors start treating them as #C 
for complex.  This is the kind of experimentation I like.

>   I also didn't expect everyone to drop
> their current Common Lisp in a rush to a decimized uncommon lisp.
> It's an experiment, a side branch, only useful if it works out.

My point is that you don't need a side branch.  You just need a library.

> 'slisp' is unusable, as it only has integers currently and is likely
> to be too primative, and most important, lacks a group of active
> developers.

You can do financial computations in CL using ratios if you need to.  
That may or may not help, but at least in CL you already have it.

Cheers
--
Marco
--
Marco Antoniotti					http://bioinformatics.nyu.edu
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