[M3devel] Unbounded but finite LONGINT (was: Re: Integers
Tony Hosking
hosking at cs.purdue.edu
Sat Jan 9 03:32:47 CET 2010
On 8 Jan 2010, at 20:33, hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 07:53:07PM -0500, Tony Hosking wrote:
>> I think what you are advocating is Rodney's proposal + assignability
>> of INTEGER and LONGINT + mixed arithmetic.
>
> I thought Rodney's propsal still had the compiler impose a bound on the
> size of LONGINT. Or did I miss something?
Yes, it would.
> I'm proposing to let the programmer use subranges of LONGINT that are as
> long as he wishes. And if the computer runs out of virtual memory to
> store one of the programmer's long integers, well, that's the computer
> imposing the limit, not the language.
But there is still the question as to what *representation* is used to decide the particular operation to apply.
I suppose the compiler could choose a particular machine representation based on the range of values in the subrange (much as it does currently).
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.
Just for fun, I suggest you take some time to watch the talk Growing a Language, by Guy Steele
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