Re: [Chicken-users] Exact flownums not properly displayed in mingw

[Peter Bex]

On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 05:15:31PM +0200, Michele La Monaca wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 3:44 PM, John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Chicken uses the local C's idea of number-to-string conversion.
> 
> Not the best approach I think. I would rather prefer a consistent behavior.

Windows is being obnoxiously "different" here, and IIRC we've discussed
this before and decided to accept things are the way they are, because
it's just too difficult to make Windows play nice without providing a
complete implementation of number->string ourselves.  There's even a test
which is disabled on Windows because it prints numbers differently, which
is rather unfortunate.

The main problem is that none of the CHICKEN core developers use Windows
on a regular basis (or just don't use Windows, period), so nobody can put
in the effort required to make this relatively minor thing work just right.
There are worse things wrong with CHICKEN on Windows than that it prints
numbers differently!

> > Since "1." is a valid Scheme inexact number, that's perfectly fine.
> 
> Being a valid Scheme number it's not a valid reason to dislay it as it is, 
> IMHO.

It gets read back the same as if it was written with the trailing zero,
and if you write it out again you get the same output.  In my opinion,
that's not any different from UNIX, only there's a slight difference in
the default representation.  It doesn't cause any incompatibilities AFAIK.
All in all, the reasons are valid enough.  Anyway: I for one don't oppose
changing it to match the UNIX output, if you'd care to provide a patch.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://www.more-magic.net