On Monday, July 18, 2016 at 10:16:58 AM UTC+5:30, Ben Finney wrote: > You will be able to express yourself much more clearly on this topic > when you cease conflating a number with measurements of that number, or > conflating a number with representations of that number. >
That more or less sums up (my understanding of) scheme's intent of having the exact/inexact classification: An inexact number is a measured/observed number with that data intentionally preserved. An exact number is just a mathematic number ie a plain ol' number From the scheme docs I earlier quoted: | [Motivation for (in)exact...] the inexactness of a number (is a property | that) should not be lost silently. As Chris question/example illustrates this may be sufficiently messed up by floats that the distinction may not be worth making. Dunno... Ive no definite opinion/data on that. To put it simply float is such a grotesquely unmathematical type that it is unlikely to cooperate with clean orthogonal distinctions such as - Exact/inexact types are orthogonal to the rest of the number hierarchy - Modelling converts a ‘real-world’ measurement/observation into a mathematical entity - etc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
