Re: Exposing more math functionality

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Heya,

On Fri 23 Jul 2010 20:46, No Itisnt <theseaisinhere@gmail.com> writes:

> I'd like to patch Guile's math functionality to expose M_PI, modf, and
> probably other things as well. Before I started I thought I'd ask --
> would such a patch be accepted? And is there any policy on where they
> should go? It seems a little crass to clutter up the (guile) namespace
> any more, but I don't see anywhere else those could go.

Hum, I think the right thing is to talk about these one by one.

For pi, I think I'd like to avoid adding it to the namespace, partly
because I can't think of a good name. M_PI is ugly :) You can always
define it as (define pi (* 4 (atan 1))) or something.

Actually my schooling was in engineering, so I'd say (define pi 3). ;-)

Regarding modf -- it seems that the R6RS extends the definition of
`modulo' (called `mod') to be defined over the real numbers.

  (mod 10 3) => 1
  (mod 10 3.0) => 1.0
  (mod 10 3.1) => 0.7

This appears to be a compatible extension of the R5RS' `modulo', so we
should just extend our definition. That way we can avoid adding another
symbol.

Let me know if you're interested in doing this, otherwise I'll get
around to it eventually. But perhaps someone who is less fast-and-loose
with accuracy should do it ;-)

Cheers,

Andy
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