#10 numerical computation bug ?

[Anonymous]

I am new to scheme and was playing around
with Jscheme to get started.

> (define (square x) (* x x))
{jsint.Closure square[1] (x)}
> (square (square (square (square 5))))
-2030932031

I get a negative quantity !

However I should get 152587890625 (both
Kawa and my cheap casio calculator give me
this value correctly).

[Timothy John Hickey]

Logged In: YES
user_id=17797

The problem is that you are using integers which have a
fixed size of
32 bigs, once you get over about 2 billion (2^32) it
switches to
negative numbers. This is a Java phenomenon, you can get
around it
using floating point numbers
(square (square (square (square 5.0))))

We generally use the mailing lists for bug reporting and the
bugs reported here were supposed to go there, but they haven't
so we have a years worth of unseen bug reports. Sorry....

Next time try jscheme-users@sourceforge.net ....