On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 13:03 -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote: > Okay, as has been suggested, the type order for numbers should go: > > int->bignum->float > > owing to the fact that floats are lossy and nasty. I'm not entirely > sure I agree, given that floats are supported in hardware and faster > (I've gotten a suggestion that we only do float and bignum for PMCs, > since float ops are nearly as fast as int ops, and there are more > bits, but the quiet loss of precision bothers me enough that I'm not > sure I'm up for that) but it's a sensible argument.
Can't this be something config-able? On my machine, perl -e '$c++ while ((2**$c)!=(2**$c + 1)); print ($c-1)' prints 52, which seems a lot better than the ~32 available for most people's ints. I can't imagine immediately any reason why the promotion to a bignum for >52 bit ints would be conceptually different than a promotion to a double for >32 bit ints. Did I accidentally delete some important bits of the conversation? Peter
