Re: [Chicken-hackers] Patch for ticket #1587

[Peter Bex]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 02:25:33PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> See the ticket for explanations.

After discussing on IRC, I'm not sure I believe this is correct.
Given that we don't support complex numbers of mixed exactness, it
makes more sense to return 0.0 for the imaginary part of a flonum.

Inexactness is contagious in complex numbers; if any of the two
parts are inexact, the entire number is inexact.  I think it's
quite counter-intuitive to return exact zero for the imaginary part
of a flonum, even though we know it to be "not there", so exactly
zero.  So given that, I would lean towards keeping the current
behaviour, especially since this would strictly speaking require
us to go through the change request process.

What do others think about this?

Cheers,
Peter

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature