Re: [ANN] Lua 5.3.0 (work1) now available

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Roberto Ierusalimschy once stated:
> >   As a thought---I know it's not C89, but what about changing the default
> > Lua numeric type to "long double" for those that need 64-bit integers?
> 
> We thought about that option; we even distributed some time ago a copy
> of luaconf.h to compile Lua 5.2 with long doubles exactly as a form of
> support for 64 bits. It has several problems:
> 
> - Even in C99, a long double is not required to have 64 bits in the
> mantissa. (It can be equal to double, and it actually is in some systems.)
> 
> - This representation can be quite slow in some systems.
> 
> - It increases the use of memory (everthing is bigger, because numbers
> are represented unboxed in Lua).
> 
> - It does not help with the problem of small systems (the 32/32 option).

  Ah.  Well then ... forget my next message (sent before I got this).

  -spc