4 ms·

Those practical bounds have a tendency to percolate into bounding other things. So you can only have 2**10 foos because they're indexed by a 10-bit bitfield som

Those practical bounds have a tendency to percolate into bounding other things. So you can only have 2**10 foos because they're indexed by a 10-bit bitfield somewhere? Now maybe you can only have 204 bars, because every bar has at least 5 foos. And so on. If you genuinely wanted to reason solidly about such limits, you do end up needing arbitrarily bounded integers. Of course, most people don't want to do that, for good reasons. And even if you wanted it, there's a reasonable question whether adding them to the language syntax is really the right thing to do.

jstimpfle 5y ago
Yup, that kinda was my point, and where you say "at least" that is also a good point why setting up some complicated static system to maintain limits is not practical. Hence my philosophy has been for a long time to set the physical constraints that just have to be decided (and do that as best as I can). And then to not worry (more than a tiny bit) about statically deciding the rest, or it'll end in a nightmare.