[plt-dev] Inexact integers

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 9:32 PM, David Van Horn <dvanhorn at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> I talked with the PLTers who attended TFP and it was agreed that inexact
>> integers, a holdover from Scheme standards, are counter intuitive.  I wonder
>> if it is worth doing away with them in Racket?
>
> Maybe in a later release. But the design of the number hierarchy is
> complex so if we were to contemplate such a thing, the proposal would
> probably have to be more concrete. (After all, we dno't want to do
> away with something float-like completely, for performance reasons.)

First, the change to racket is a new language, and thus an opportunity
for things to be different.  Future releases won't have this
opportunity.

Second, here's a concrete proposal: in `racket/base' and all derived
languages, `integer?' means what `exact-integer?' means in
`scheme/base'.  `scheme' and `scheme/base' stay the same.  No other
changes are made to the number hierarchy.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu