Integer overflow in exponent

[ksvanhorn]

scientific 1 (maxBound::Int) * scientific 1 (maxBound::Int) evaluates to 1.0e-2.

[basvandijk]

Yes, this is unfortunate. Scientific uses an Int to represent the exponent so it suffers from the same integer overflows that Int suffers from. I've an old TODO to switch the exponent to Integer to make Scientific truly arbitrary precision.

[basvandijk]

I started doing some work on this on the integer-exponent branch.

[mbj]

I'd prefer we throw an impure error instead of producing wrong values, till we can get arbitrary precision would a patch be accepted that calls Prelude(error) on any operation that would result in corruption?