Scheme, in contrast, supports both exact and inexact numbers and arithmetic. Of course, the base of the representation is 2, not 10, because Scheme uses the underlying computer's on-off machinery. Some numeric operations, though, produce inexact numbers. Scheme programmers can thus choose to use exact arithmetic or inexact arithmetic as necessary. For some problems, however, we may not wish to spend the extra time to produce exact results.
Scientific computations are a primary example.
In such cases, we may wish switch to inexact numbers and arithmetic. Over the past few decades, the study of this complex question has evolved into an advanced topic, called numerical analysis. The discipline has become a subject of its own right in applied mathematics or in computer science departments. Explain the observations. Develop the function my-expt , which raises one number to the power of some integer.