[vinaypai]

Okay, I was just wondering if there's something non-obvious here. I guess OP is just woefully misguided about languages other than scheme or "these languages can't handle it" means something more like "I don't know how to use those languages".

[mlyle]

Decent complex types and library calls to do exponentiation, etc, don't always come for free in any given language environment. It's nice that it "just works" in many scheme environments (but this is not the only language runtime where this is true and it's not something that you can't work around).

[vinaypai]

The example the OP cited doesn't involve complex numbers. Atan(1) is pi/4.

[mlyle]

Sigh.

1i is an imaginary number. We are discussing the difficulty in calculating i^i, not whether a language can do atan(1).