Re: small integers, numerical efficiency

[moon (David A. Moon)]

> Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 09:45:36 -0500
> From: kanderso@BBN.COM
> 
>   Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 15:56:46 EST
>   From: "David A. Moon" <moon@cambridge.apple.com>
>   
>   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.
>   
> Does "optional" mean one would not be able to use floats in a portable way? 

Optional means optional.  That is, each implementation could choose whether to 
include it or not.  Obviously if your program uses floating point it would only be 
portable to implementations that include floating point.