Nate Holloway wrote:
>
>
> Fortunately, Common Lisp requires that all FLOAT types have a most-
> positive and most-negative value, which a bigfloat type with
unlimited
> range would not be able to define. So it seems like bigfloats are
> required to be implemented at a level above the language itself.
I don't think this is correct. For the subtypes of FLOAT specified by
the language, then there must be extremum values, since constants are
defined for them. However I *don't* think that the language standard
says that there cannot be other subtypes of FLOAT, (for instance
BIG-FLOAT), and I don't think that such subtypes, if they existed, need
have limits.
I admit to having not checked really carefully for this, but I'd be
mildly disapointed if it wasn't the case as it would make it hard for
implementations to experiment with things like, well, big floats!
--tim