Responding to a historic criticism:
Disagree, integers are much more fundamental. Floating-point numbers, in particular, may be constructed from the integers (indeed, that’s how they’re defined, and that’s how they’re implemented), so a “static float” or another “static real” type is less essential for inclusion into Base
.
That said, I think adding more such types into Base
could be a good thing. It’s true that Base
is too fat (e.g., it depends on GMP and even MPFR), but that’s no argument for excluding these more fundamental features from Base
.