[M3devel] LONGINT, my original proposal

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 05:45:09PM -0500, Tony Hosking wrote:
> Do you recall why CARDINAL is defined to behave like 
> [0..LAST(INTEGER)]  instead of [0..16_FFFFFFFF]?

It's so that all CARDINALs are INTEGERs, presumably back when it was 
thought important to have only one base type on top of the type 
hierarchy.  I've always thought that was a mistake.

The simplest way to avoid that with LONGINT is to let programmers use 
only subranges of LONGINT, and to impose no limit on those subranges 
except for mamory capacity.

This also means we don't have a FIRST(LONGINT) or a LAST(LONGINT) 
either.

-- hendrik