At 10:56 AM 12/27/00 -0800, Damien Neil wrote:
>I'd be in favor of defining Perl's "native int" type to be at least
>32 bits long. I would recommend against using the compiler's default
>int type in all cases, as there are compilers which define int as 16
>bits for backwards compatability reasons. (As opposed to 16 bits being
>the native word size of the architecture.)
I'm not proposing using the compiler int unconditionally, since that might
not be what you want--my ints on Alpha could be 32 or 64 bits. What gets
chosen is up to the folks handling a particular port. What I am proposing
is the 'fast' version of a scalar's integer representation (and float
representation) be flexible and, if circumstances call for it, anything the
platform porters want.
This isn't C, where variables are declared and fixed in size once created.
Our integers will be generally unbounded in size--what I want is for the
platform people to have the option of choosing a fast version of integer
scalars that can be used when appropriate, and switching to the slower
bigint version when things over or underflow.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
