From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-02-16T12:30:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01418] Re: Bignum aset


In message "[ruby-talk:01412] Re: Bignum aset"
    on 00/02/15, Andrew Hunt <andy@Toolshed.Com> writes:

|It wouldn't be so confusing if you could explictly create
|a new Bignum:
|
|	bucket = Bignum.new(200)

No, you can't.  In Ruby, you can't have Bignums which is not big
enough (i.e range of Fixnums).  This restriction is on purpose, not by
the implementation.

|Could make a bit array starting off as 200 bytes long.  I suppose
|it could be accidently coerced to a Fixnum if it were too small,
|but I'd rather see bit access as part of the existing classes
|instead of creating another one if possible.

You can always use bitwise-or to set particular bit.

  a |= nth_bit

just like C, without size limitation.

							matz.