Making this efficient at the machine level gets hard. Hardware engineers really want to do 32 or 64 bit add/subtract/etc. datapaths, and handling range types in

Making this efficient at the machine level gets hard. Hardware engineers really want to do 32 or 64 bit add/subtract/etc. datapaths, and handling range types in pipelines is hard, so it's up to software to do anything more complicated. Suddenly you're talking half a dozen instructions to do an ADD and programmers no longer want to use your language. Efficiency is a convenient god when you're not willing to pay for being correct.