Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR: expt should signal error on domain error

[felix]

John Cowan <cowan <at> mercury.ccil.org> writes:

> I've voted no on this, primarily because I think a deviation from
> IEEE behavior needs considerable justification.  NaNs were introduced
> into floating-point representations precisely so that it wouldn't be
> necessary to raise and catch exceptions.

Well, there is a floating-point specific operator that behaves according to IEEE
(on those platforms that do, that is): "fpexpt". In most cases, informing the
user of such a situation may be desirable. Would you suggest "(/ 1 0)" should
return NaN as well?


cheers,
felix