Re: pi seems not to be a constant

Raymond Toy <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.clisp.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>>>>> "Pierpaolo" == Pierpaolo Bernardi <[email protected]> writes:

    Pierpaolo> On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Don Cohen
    Pierpaolo> <[email protected]> wrote:

    >> > The problem then is the value of CL:PI.  What do you propose it should be?
    >> 
    >> I propose it should be the default value before changing
    >> LONG-FLOAT-DIGITS.
    >> 
    >> > If you use EXT:LONG-FLOAT-DIGITS then you are outside of portable CL,
    >> > and you should take into account your uses of this function in your
    >> > coding.
    >> Exactly.  So PI should be the constant value that it would be without
    >> using that.
    >> 
    >> > If you don't use EXT:LONG-FLOAT-DIGITS then the only non-confomance is
    >> > that some things that should be constant variables are variables
    >> > instead (but they won't in fact vary).
    >> 
    >> In my solution, if you don't use long-float-digits one might
    >> reasonably argue that everything is compliant - there are no better
    >> approximations of pi available without using long-float-digits.

    Pierpaolo> Yes, now it is a sound proposal. But, if implemented in plain Clisp it
    Pierpaolo> would make variable precision floats a PITA to use, in addition to
    Pierpaolo> invalidating all previously written Clisp programs using variable
    Pierpaolo> precision floats.

    Pierpaolo> One solution could be for the ansi mode to transform all these
    Pierpaolo> variables in constant variables, and remove the EXT:LONG-FLOAT-DIGITS
    Pierpaolo> function from the image.

As a user (not developer), I rather like that if I (setf
(long-float-digits)), pi does change.  That clisp is the only lisp I
use where long-float and double-float are different has allowed to
find and fix erroneous assumptions in my code where I had assumed pi
was a double-float.

--
Ray


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