On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 10:43:16PM +0300, Lassi Kortela wrote:
We are planning a simple SRFI to mae floats from integers (or from strings), since that's useful when parsing any kind of text syntax that has real numbers. The details are implementation-dependent and tricky to get right.
Here's the spec we have so far: https://github.com/pre-srfi/make-float
The API is:
(inexact-real-from-strings int frac precision exp) -> real (inexact-real-from-integers int frac frac-length precision exp) -> real
Example usage:
(inexact-real-from-strings "-123" "45" 'e "6") ; => -123.45e6 (inexact-real-from-integers -123 45 2 'e 6) ; => -123.45e6
The 2 in the last example means two decimal places. It's needed to disambiguate between .6 .06 .006 .0006 etc.
There are both math and Scheme wizards on this list. Could someone verify whether this is a sane design before we submit the SRFI draft? It's been ok'd by one mathematician already so I'm hopeful :)
There's also an inverse API to serve as a backend for string formatting packages:
(strings-from-inexact-real real frac-length) -> int; frac; exp (integers-from-inexact-real real frac-length) -> int; frac; exp
Conversion on a round trip between float and string form should converge rapidly. At the least, string to float to string to float should give the same value as just string to float and similarly for float to string to float to string.
And there's the question of what to do with he various not-a-number floating point values.
And what if you do not want an exponent in the resulting string?
And finally, there are ties you want it read and written *exactly*, for example, using hexadecimal instead of decimal so you get every bit. (for this you'd want a symbol for the exponent 'e' that's different from the digit 'e'.
-- hendrik