Formal comment #203 (defect)

->exact and ->inexact should be renamed
Reported by: 	Kent Dybvig 	
Component: 	arithmetic 	
Version: 	5.92

These names ->exact and ->inexact are ugly. They also vaguely imply a
conversion is necessarily occuring and, therefore, that ->whatever
should not be applied to something that is already whatever. (They
are, however, better in this regard than the original names
inexact->exact and exact->inexact.)

Proposal:

Change the name ->exact to exact and change the name ->inexact to
inexact, so that, e.g., (exact 3.0) and (exact 3) are both 3 and
(inexact 3.0) and (inexact 3) are both 3.0.

These names appear more or less like casts and do not imply that a
conversion is necessarily taking place. They are also consistent with
the names char-upcase, string-downcase, etc., which contain no -> and
also name procedures that operate on values that may need no
conversion. To my mind, they also seem more consistent with the #e and
#i exactness prefixes.


RESPONSE:

This proposal will be adopted, i.e., these procedures will be named exact
and inexact in the next version of the report.