Why doesn't the report include procedures like flonum-mantissa,
flonum-exponent, flonum-sign, etc. that return the mantissa, exponent,
and sign, etc.? The implementation should already be able to determine
the mantissa width (at least for denormalized numbers, see section
3.2.7, page 14, second column). These are all pretty trivial
operations, especially if the implementation's flonums are IEEE
doubles.
Also, since it looks like the report leaves room for implementation to
support inexacts with arbitrary precision, we have a relationship
between inexacts and flonums that is similar to exact integers and
fixnums. Since fixnums have operations such as fixnum-width, etc.,
similar operations for flonums would seem to be appropriate.
In addition, functions like flonum-epsilon, flonum-min-exp,
flonum-max-exp, etc. would be useful.
Peter Gavin
<pgavin_at_gmail.com>
Received on Mon Sep 18 2006 - 21:46:02 UTC