Re: [AC21.5] Texinfo manual kilo-patch

On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 08:31:36PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Let's move this to xemacs-design

Agreed.

> >>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>     Hrvoje> Non-bignum XEmacs basically does what C does, which sets
>     Hrvoje> the expectation quite low.  I was wondering if a bignum
>     Hrvoje> XEmacs could do better for floating point operations, like
>     Hrvoje> it does better for integers.
> 
> Yes, it can, but not automatically and reliably.  Assuming that
> mantissas of bigfloats are not represented in a base evenly divisible
> by 3, what precision should
> 
>     (* 1.0 1/3)
> 
> have?

Good point.  Which reminds me: now that we have rationals, do we
even want to do floating point contagion?  Think of it this way:
any FP number can be converted to a rational without loss of
precision, while the reverse doesn't hold.  In other words, would
anything break if (* 1.0 1/3) converted 1.0 to 1/1 and returned
1/3?