Re: small integers, numerical efficiency

[moon (David A. Moon)]

> From: zilla@ccrl.nj.nec.com     (John Lewis)
> Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 14:37:25 EST
> ....
> David Moon (i recall) commented that he would rather see
> floating point removed from Dylan than have a half-baked numeric
> system like that in C.  ....

I did not say those last four words.

What I said was that I think a Dylan implementation would be better off 
leaving out floating point entirely than putting in floating point but not 
doing it efficiently.

Then from a language point of view, we could decide that few implementations 
will want to bother doing floating point efficiently, and therefore remove it 
from the language, or we could make it optional in the language, or we could 
leave the language the way it is and some implementations could announce that 
they only support a subset.  Personally I prefer making it optional over 
either extreme.  Floating point is not the only thing in the Dylan book that 
ought to be optional.

Also, C's integer numeric system is half-baked, but its floating-point numeric 
system is not particularly bad.  I say enough bad things about C that you 
don't need to misquote me disparaging a part of C that doesn't bother me!