On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 01:40:40PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 01:36 PM 3/2/2001 -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> >Do you also want an unsigned variant? (trying to spare Nick some of
> >the sign preservation madness he's currently battling in perl5.)
>
> Well, we've got an unsigned version of the native type, but I don't see
> much point in one for the bigint--one bit in a fixed 32 (or 16, or 64)
> makes a difference, but one bit in some variable-length integer doesn't
> seem to be really worth the extra trouble.
an unsigned type large enough to hold all possible signed or unsigned values
without loss of bits is the only sane (possible/portable?) way of doing
some things.
[at the C level]
By which I mean that if (say) IV is 36 bits, but BIG_NUM is 72
[I understand that there's a PDP port of current gcc underway] at some
points it becomes necessary to have an unsigned type for "the largest
integer" which in this case would be 72 bits.
[and on a machine with nothing larger than 32 will be 32]
The type that used to be known as "unsigned long"
[before "unsigned long long" appeared on some machines and made life confusing]
Nicholas Clark
