On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 02:04:55PM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote: > FYI, I produced a simple patch a while back to fix this (see below), but > it had an interesting side effect: it caused the reader to read things > like "3/0" and "4+3/0i" as symbols. More generally, anything for which > 'scm_string_to_number' returns false is treated as a symbol by 'read'.
I think this is simple and at least internally consistent. Several Schemes assume something like 1/0 is a symbol; Chicken does this as well, with the numbers egg loaded, so does Gambit. Raising an error is also acceptable. According to the lexical syntax 1/0 *is* a valid number, so you could argue that it *must* parse as a number, which is impossible so an error should occur. This is also related to how string->number deals with it; if it returns #f it is essentially saying "this is not valid numerical syntax" and should fail to parse as a number. Not raising an exception on (string->number "1/0) but raising an exception on (with-input-from-string "1/0" read) is a bit odd, I'd say. Cheers, Peter -- http://www.more-magic.net
