Promoting to Complex

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

At 9/27/2010 11:09 AM, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 01:58:13PM -0400, Paul C. Anagnostopoulos wrote:
>> Folks,
>> 
>> Should PMC functions with partial complex ranges promote their result to a
>> Complex? For example, should sqrt(negative Float) produce a Complex? 
>> This issue does not pertain to native numbers, since we never promote 
>> them to PMCs.
>
>I would tend to vote "no" here.  Most languages would expect
>sqrt(negative Float) to throw an exception, and if a language
>wants the possibility of a complex result it's trivially simple
>to promote a Float to a Complex prior to calling the function.

Throw an exception, or return NaN? Right now most math functions return NaN or garbage on range errors or on complex domains.

~~ Paul


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