[M3devel] LONGINT, my original proposal

[Tony Hosking]

That is a drastic (and I think fatal) departure from the spirit of the language.

On 9 Jan 2010, at 21:57, hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:

> 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

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