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                          rational-to-string

The rational-to-string package essentially allows you to do arbitrary
precision floating point in Common Lisp by converting your input
floating point to rational numbers using (string-to-rational).  You
can then do all of your arithmetic using Common Lisp's built-in
support for arbitrary precision rational numbers.  When you are done,
you can then output your result to as many decimal places as you like
using (rational-to-string).  Scientific notation can be used for both
input and output.

Another exported function that is of general use is
(parse-decimal-string) which knows how to parse strings of the
following form:

    "[+|-]<whole_part>.<fract_part>[e|E[+|-]<exp_part>]"

This software and the associated unit tests were developed using
sbcl circa 1.0.42.

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                              Unit Tests

To build and run the unit tests using sbcl, do the following:

  1) Make sure the lisp-unit package is available to asdf.  The
     easiest way to install lisp-unit is via Quicklisp

         http://www.quicklisp.org/

  2) sbcl --script build.lisp

  3) ./rational-to-string-test

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