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

[Peter Bex]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 10:41:22AM +0200, Felix wrote:
> > +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.

In this particular case I don't care one iota about what's intuitive or
not with regards to how floating point numbers behave, nor what I'm
used to.

What I care about is internal consistency.  Having fp+ behave differently
from + is unintuitive.  If you want to fix it to be more intuitive, please
do, but then please, please please fix it in *both* the + and fp+ procedures.

> 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.

A very smart man I deeply respect once said: "It is not necessary to say that"

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
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