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

[Felix]

From: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR: expt should signal error on domain error
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 09:21:44 +0200

> On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 02:47:01AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>> Felix scripsit:
>> 
>> > * Those who want IEEE behaviour can have it using "fpexpt".
>> 
>> True.  However, I tend to expect that the fp* functions will provide
>> efficient versions of the regular procedures (because they know their
>> arguments are flonums) rather than returning different results.
> 
> +1 on that.  Having the fp (or fx, for that matter) procedures behave
> differently from the "generic" ones on flonums is unintuitive and seems
> to me like trouble in the making.

Is this intuition, or are you simply being used to it? I learned in
School that division by zero is invalid. Nobody told me about nonsense
like positive or negative zero, or numbers that aren't. That is
unintuitive.  Unfortunately we take conventions born out of technical
peculiarities or peformance hacks for granted.

This deeply disappoints me. You all are a bunch of robots.


cheers,
felix