On 29/04/14 14:53, Peter Bex wrote:

>> Being able to do this is part of the point of having a
>> -large *standard* as opposed to just writing a lot of SRFIs.
>
> I don't see why this has to be.  It will just exclude small
> specialised implementations which would still like to support
> a standardised library if it fits its intended use cases.
> For example, Chibi Scheme might decide to ship a few WG2 modules,
> but you can compile it without bignum support.  Does that mean
> it isn't WG2-compatible?

I think it's perhaps difficult to define what "bignum support" is, which
means that any argument about whether an implementation provides bignums
and whether a library requires them is doomed to end up without a useful
conclusion.

Perhaps any given library or program really needs to say "I need exact
integers in the range X to Y", and implementations either accept that
module/program or don't, and there's some reasonable lower limit of
range that can be assumed without bothering to ask; this might be
defined in terms of other aspects of the implementation ("enough to
index any vector that can be created on the machine") as well as an
actual numeric range ("-2^29..2^29-1").

>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>

ABS

--
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

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