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Revenge of the Ballot
- To: Dir LCSR Comp Facility <HEDRICK@RUTGERS>
- Subject: Revenge of the Ballot
- From: Scott E. Fahlman <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C>
- Date: Tue, 07 Jun 1983 03:59:00 -0000
- Cc: common-lisp@SU-AI
- In-reply-to: Msg of 6 Jun 83 18:24:32 EDT from Dir LCSR Comp Facility <HEDRICK at RUTGERS.ARPA>
B1. OK. One possible disadvantage is that floating-point contagion
is not guaranteed to work. That is, floating point has an upper
bound, whereas bignum's don't. What would you do with
(COMPLEX 1E-5 ZILLION), where ZILLION is a very big bignum?
We would do the same thing as we would do in the case of (+ 1E-5 ZILLION).
We would try to float the ZILLION in this format, and if it was too
large to fit, we'd get a floating-overflow error.