🚀 go-pugleaf

FFarance <ffarance@aol.com> wrote:
[a lot of good discussion deleted]
>In summary, 128 bits seems like a reasonable minimum maxima but
>arbritrary precision would meet much resistance.  Of course, I agree
>that arbitrary precision would be useful.  However, we have to take
>this step by step.  The SBEIR establishes the basics of solving the
>integer range problem.  Maybe later we can look at extending the
>implementation limits (just as C9X is now looking to extend the
>implementation limits of C89).

I think it's rather misleading to refer to what I propose as "arbitrary
precision", but not the current SBEIR proposal.  On a 16-bit machine,
128 bits is eight words, arithmetic with which isn't going to be
inlined unrolled as a matter of course.  128 bits may well be a
sensible minimum maximum at the moment, but I don't think it's
unreasonable to expect implementations to handle any fixed (at
compile-time) size integral type that can be reasonably manipulated on
the hardware in question.

-zefram