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soegaardtoday at 8:27 PM0 repliesview on HN

Yeah - the number syntax is pretty cool.

    #i is the prefix for inexact
    #e is the prefix for exact
So `#e0.1` is exact 0.1 which means it will be read as an exact fraction 1/10 and `#i0.1` will be read as a floating point number.

The `i` in `8i` is the imaginary unit. The `1@1` is the polar notation for complex numbers.

The `10#` is a compatibility remain (the Scheme authors wanted a way to see how many signifant digits were known. In `10#` there 2. So `#` stands for "some digit". In most implementations this is read as 0. More details at [1]

An `#` followed by a list datum is read as a vector. Thus `#()` is an empty vector and `()` is an empty list.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/10936403/23567

Complicated? Well, to support both inexact (floating point) and exact numbers (bignums and fractions) it makes sense to have `#i` and `#e` to explicitl choose. The default is (more or less): numbers with . are inexact the others are exact.