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-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; ">On 8 Jan 2010, at 20:33, <a href="mailto:hendrik@topoi.pooq.com">hendrik@topoi.pooq.com</a> wrote:</span></div></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div></span></span></div><div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 07:53:07PM -0500, Tony Hosking wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite">I think what you are advocating is Rodney's proposal + assignability <br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">of INTEGER and LONGINT + mixed arithmetic.<br></blockquote><br>I thought Rodney's propsal still had the compiler impose a bound on the <br>size of LONGINT. Or did I miss something?<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, it would.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>I'm proposing to let the programmer use subranges of LONGINT that are as <br>long as he wishes. And if the computer runs out of virtual memory to <br>store one of the programmer's long integers, well, that's the computer <br>imposing the limit, not the language.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>But there is still the question as to what *representation* is used to decide the particular operation to apply.</div><div><br></div><div>I suppose the compiler could choose a particular machine representation based on the range of values in the subrange (much as it does currently).</div><div>But if you really want to have an arbitrary range type I would argue it is much better to implement it as a library than as a primitive type.</div><div><br></div><div>Just for fun, I suggest you take some time to watch the talk <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415">Growing a Language, by Guy Steele</a></div></div></body></html>