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

[Felix]

Hi!


I would like to pick up this discussion, since you haven't replied to
my last e-mails about this subject, and because I think this is
important.

To restate my points:

* Those who want IEEE behaviour can have it using "fpexpt".

* I think that it makes sense to fail fast when the result of an
  operation can not be properly represented in the system, due to
  implementation restrictions.

* Not all users expect or appreciate IEEE behaviour for such an
  operation and so +NaN may be unintuitive, since other numerical
  operations clearly fail when encountering a domain error (and fail
  because it matches what people usually expect, for example in the
  case of div-by-zero).

Could you comment on this?


cheers,
felix