[M3devel] A "radical" proposal: drop LONGINT

[Rodney M. Bates]

Tony Hosking wrote:
> But my question is what are the current use-cases for LONGINT?  Do they 
> justify retaining it?
> 

I want to code stuff that requires arithmetic in > 2^32 range, and be
portable between 32- and 64-bit targets.  Using a record with two
INTEGERs on 32-bit machines and INTEGER on 64-bit machines would require
a lot of code differences between the targets, and the differences
can be pervasive.

OTOH, using the record on all machines will not take advantage of native
64-bit arithmetic when available.

Encapsulating the arithmetic in function calls also would add a lot of
overhead, unless we had a compiler that would inline them, which, as
I understand, we do not.  It's also not as readable.  I am a staunch
opponent of adding user-definable operator overloading to get this
readability advantage, because it interacts with all kinds of things
and makes the language just absurdly overcomplicated.  But LONGINT
arithmetic is language-defined and highly constrained overloading,
so the language complexity impact is much less.


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>