Hardware dependency

[Ron Wichers Schreur]

Hello,

Our apologies for not responding to this thread earlier. Standard excuse:
things have been quite busy lately. A few remarks that have been made
in this discussion.

* The numerical operations in Clean's standard environment should be
  defined more precisely.

  Agreed. We are working on a separate description of the StdEnv (it has
  been removed from the language reference manual). 

* The implementation of some operations in Clean relies on the C library.

  It does on some platforms, on other platforms we use our own implementation.
  As a consequence some operations may be platform dependent. We acknowledge
  that this is an undesirable situation.

* There should be an arbitrary precision integer library.

  We are working on this and will distribute it as an extension to the StdEnv.
  The StdEnv that's distributed with Clean 1.3 has been slightly reorganised to
  allow this.

* Some kind of exception handling is desirable.

  Perhaps, but it's not high on our priority list.


Cheers,

Ronny Wichers Schreur