[M3devel] Unbounded but finite LONGINT

[Rodney M. Bates]

Tony Hosking wrote:
> On 8 Jan 2010, at 20:33, hendrik at topoi.pooq.com 
> <mailto: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.

This I agree with wholeheartedly.  Don't we already have some math libraries
for things like this, or maybe rational arithmetic, etc?


> 
> Just for fun, I suggest you take some time to watch the talk Growing a 
> Language, by Guy Steele 
> <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415>