User talk:GordonCharlton: Difference between revisions

:: Rationals are definitely an edge case. On the one hand, as you note, instant access to the num and den is convenient. The counter-argument is that rationals are undeniably composite, and having a single nest to represent them would ease the stack pressure. I pondered it a fair bit, and to be honest it could have gone either way. The answer - for me - was that switching between two numbers and a single nest is fairly easy - either with <code>2 pack</code> and <code>unpack</code> or, less cleanly but more efficiently with <code>join</code> and <code>do</code>. The question is, should every bignum word have to unpack its arguments at the start and unpackpack them at the end, or is it preferable to let the programmer put in that additional code just when circumstances suggest it? ... If you would have preferred the former choice, you can put in a little preamble to your code along the lines of