Re: [Chicken-users] A few questions...

[John.Cowan]

felix winkelmann scripsit:

> Q1: should `signum' be exactness-preserving? (i.e. should inexactness
>   be contagious)

Yes, it should.  Returning an exact 0 for the signum of 0.0 would suggest
that 0.0 can only represent an exact 0, whereas it can in fact represent
any number less than e and greater than -e, where e is the smallest
strictly positive flonum.

> Q2: Does "#.<EXP>" (read-time-eval) make sense? (controlled via a
>   parameter to avoid unexpected securty issues)

IMHO #, (SRFI-10) provides a reasonable balance between flexibility and
security already, because it limits the possibilities to a predefined
list of reader-constructor procedures rather than allowing arbitrary evals.
In particular, allowing full evaluation in *data* seems particularly dangerous.
I think SRFI-10 is quite correct in saying that a mere on-off switch is
too crude.  So I'd say don't add this.

While I'm at it, I think it would be useful for you to advertise that SWIG
supports Chicken, as I only found this out at the SWIG site.  People are
probably writing their own wrappers when they could and should be using
SWIG at least for the lower-level part of the job.


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