Module inc::immediate

Runtime representation of scheme objects

Immediate values (values that can be fit in one machine word) are tagged for distinguising them from heap allocated pointers. The last 3 bits effectively serve as the runtime type of the value. Always using 3 bits is a simpler approach than the multi bit technique the paper uses. This is a very efficient and low overhead technique at the cost of losing precision - completely acceptable for types like characters and booleans but having to live with 61bit numerics instead of native 64 and some overhead for operations like multiplication & division.

See the paper for details. See tests for examples.

Constants

BOOL
CHAR
FALSE
MASK
NIL
NUM
PAIR
SHIFT
STR
SYM
TRUE
VEC

Functions

n
to	Immediate representation of an expression.