Ray Dillinger scripsit:

> With overflow to an inexact number, the first failure condition is that
> you get your answer but it may be off by one part per million or so,
> which is not so dire.
> 
> But at the same moment, your program has lost the ability to use it in
> further operations requiring exact integers, such as using its modulus
> as a vector index, etc, and this may result in a dire failure later --
> usually an execution abort when the program attempts something it just
> isn't allowed to do with inexact numbers.

I agree with all of your other points, but I think this objection is more
theoretical than real.  Most people don't have in-memory datastructures
with more than 16M elements, and therefore are unlikely to get that sort
of crash.

-- 
Barry gules and argent of seven and six,        John Cowan
on a canton azure fifty molets of the second.   [email protected]
        --blazoning the U.S. flag               http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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