5 ms·
How is a bigint not an actual integer? If you mean restricting it to a certain number of bits - there are many other languages avoid exposing the low-level syst
by matharmin 8y ago
How is a bigint not an actual integer? If you mean restricting it to a certain number of bits - there are many other languages avoid exposing the low-level system details like that. Python and Ruby are two easy examples, and I'm sure there are many more.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoHaving an abstraction that transparently switches between fixnums and bignums is fine. This is what Ruby or Python or Lisp languages do. And the abstraction is purposefully a thin one - no one is really hiding that there's fixed-bits integers underneath, because this distinction has huge performance implications.