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My understanding from 5 years ago is that in MRI the leading bit is reserved to indicate whether something is an integer. This of course reduces the size of num
by gregwebs 12y ago
My understanding from 5 years ago is that in MRI the leading bit is reserved to indicate whether something is an integer. This of course reduces the size of numbers that fit into a machine word but it seems like a pretty good tradeoff.
- lispm 12y agoMost Lisp systems use tags. Several data types will have tags included in the data word, like fixnums, characters. Other data types have an extra word.
- icebraining 12y agoYeah, apparently they're called tagged pointers. The More You Know. EDIT: And here's Guido explaining why he didn't want that in Python: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/046147.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-July/04614...