>>>>> "Robert" == Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com> writes:
Robert> I have to say that the complaint about 1000! too big to
Robert> fit in a float seems less helpful. Why not just make it
Robert> inf? (If such numbers are allowed at all.) Why should
Because 1000! is big but not infinity? :-)
I know Richard has suggested automatically converting to bigfloat for
things like this.
Robert> exp(1000e0) => inf while float(1000!) => error?
I see that ccl complains about a floating-point overflow for
exp(1000.0); cmucl returns infinity. (I think that's a bug in cmucl).
I agree we should be consistent, but so much depends on the underlying
lisp. We could implement exp ourselves, but that is probably not what
we want to do.
Ray