From: Garance A Drosehn <drosihn@...>
Date: 2005-07-07T01:27:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby2c and large numbers

On 7/5/05, Eric Hodel <drbrain@segment7.net> wrote:
> 
> On 04 Jul 2005, at 15:22, Garance A Drosehn wrote:
> >
> > One nice thing about ruby is that the programmer does not have
> > to worry about supported-ranges for integer values.  Ruby just
> > switches from "fixnum" objects into "bignum" objects, without
> > any attention from the programmer.  It seems to me that the C
> > code that is listed above just assumes the multiplication of
> > 'f * x' will not overflow.  Is that the case?
> 
> You are correct.
> 
> We could add the ability to automatically add the bignum/fixnum
> auto-conversion stuff, but we've not needed the capability yet.

It would be nice to at least detect that an overflow occurred, even
if you don't do the auto-conversion stuff.  I do use ruby in some
situations simply because I don't want to have to think if I'm going
to be overflowing any fields that I'm collecting statistics into.

I do think the Ruby2C project could be quite useful, but I wouldn't
want to lose some of the more attractive characteristics of ruby
when taking advantage of it!  :-)

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =             drosihn@gmail.com
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad@FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA