Thanks for replying.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know what the problem is that will be solved here.
The inherently difficult part of inputting or outputting floating-point numbers is converting between a human-readable base 10 representation and a machine-usable base two representation while maintaining maximal accuracy (with some side conditions for special values, overflow, underflow, etc.)
Are you proposing that this is what this pre-SRFI will do?
Yes, exactly! Each file format and programming language has a slightly different number syntax, so parsers for those are probably not fruitful to standardize. (RnRS string->number is serviceable for languages other than Scheme, but it supports such a wide range of syntax that one must be very careful to give it pre-validated input only. This is easy to get wrong.) A fundamental `make-inexact-real` procedure would be simple and useful. In the other reply, Marc proposes a better interface for it than what we came up with.