On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 3:41 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > There are good ways to deal with out-of-range results in systems languages: > > - well-defined wrap-around behaviour; > - saturation; > - trapping. > > "Do whatever the hell the compiler feels like doing" is not one of them.
Systems languages are already going to be somewhat close to the metal. They're an alternative to rewriting your code completely for every platform you're on. If you have to guard a few small sections with configure-time checks, that's still saved you the work of writing all the rest of your code twice. With applications languages, as earlier mentioned, none of this should be necessary. Sacrifice the performance and have arbitrary-precision integers, Unicode strings, garbage collection, and first-class lists/functions/mappings etc. This is only about lower-level languages. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
