Re: Fix for inconsistent (/ DIVIDEND DIVISOR &rest DIVISORS)

[Miles Bader]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 06:27:11PM -0400, Peter Whaite wrote:
> Some time ago there was a thread on division being inconsistent when
> floats were involved.  I dont know what the outcome of that discussion
> was, but it did occur to me that the simplest fix would be to multiply
> the divisors before doing the division.

That might result in overflow where there wasn't any before, especially when
all the args are fixnums.

E.g., currently:

   (/ 200000000 100000000 4)   =>  0

But your change would seem to make it equivalent to:

   (/ 200000000 (* 100000000 4)) => -1

Given that emacs already has a very restricted integer range, this is an area
where we should be very careful.

-Miles
-- 
97% of everything is grunge