At 02:15 PM 12/27/00 -0500, Uri Guttman wrote:
> >>>>> "DS" == Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> DS> Our integers will be generally unbounded in size--what I want is
> DS> for the platform people to have the option of choosing a fast
> DS> version of integer scalars that can be used when appropriate, and
> DS> switching to the slower bigint version when things over or
> DS> underflow.
>
>that made sense to me originally. but why over/underflow to bigint? what
>if i wanted the current semantics of going to float? floats will be much
>faster than bigint. how would i force a var to float then?
I don't know yet. Pragma or attribute on a variable (depending on whether
it was an occasional or common thing) would be my bet. Going floating point
would definitely be a win over going bigint, though I don't know if there
are precision loss checks in most FPUs.
>i don't recall these semantics being hashed out in the rfc phase. and
>for sure we know larry has not annointed them yet. :)
The semantics haven't been set down either from a perl or internals
standpoint yet. Perl level is Larry's problem, internals is ours. Luckily
they can be hammered out mostly independently.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
