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
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