Re: PDD 4: Internal data types

[Jarkko Hietaniemi]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 12:05:59PM -0800, Hong Zhang wrote:
> > >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]
> >
> > Sure. The size of an INT will probably be either 32 or 64 bits, depending
> > both on the size of an IV and the size of a pointer for the target
> machine.
> 
> I am still confused by the purpose of INT. Making it a union will lose type
> safety.
> Why not just use SV directly?
> 
> By the way, on OS/400, the pointer is 128 bit and may not be cast between
> int
> and void*.

I'm also confused, I thought in Perl 6 internals one idea was to never
step into the mess of trying to mix integers and pointers.  Crays have
similar casting issues.

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