[M3devel] 64bit INTEGERs, WIDECHAR: language specified or configuration/target dependent?

[Hendrik Boom]

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 09:17:17AM -0700, mika at async.caltech.edu wrote:
> 
> Hmm?
> 
> Modula-3's INTEGERs are the "integers" of mathematics.  The intent is
> that if your implementation is limited and doesn't support a particular
> operation because it goes out of range, your computation aborts.  Same
> as any other implementation limitation.
> 
> There is no reason I can think of you couldn't come up with an implementation
> that has unlimited-range integers.  FIRST(INTEGER) and LAST(INTEGER) would have
> to be a little special.

That was, in essence, my proposal for LONGINT, not for INTEGER.
We still need an integer length that's efficient.  I wasn't proposing to 
change the definition of INTEGER, FIRST(INTEGER), and so forth.

But if one had a base tyoe of LONGINT and forbade declaring anything of 
type LONGINT, you could still have BITS 45 FOR LONGINT and the like.
It just happens that the usual arithmetic operations are bounded in 
nature -- the number of bits in the result are bounded by functions of 
the numbers of bits in the operands, and an assignment so assigning 
to variable of could end up truncating, possibly with an overflow 
check.

In fact, one could possibly define INTEGER to be BITS 32 FOR 
LONGINT, but that might involve further consequences in corrner 
case in the language.

-- hendrik

> 
>      Mika