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On Jul 10, 2013 12:47 PM, "Todd Coram" <todd@maplefish.com> wrote:
> IMHO, Int64 is a very big deal (for Lua). The 53 bits of mantissa is
> sufficient for a lot of applications, but I feel dirty every time I deal
> with a protocol format that specifies a 64 bit field and I shove it into
> a Lua (5.1/5.2) number: One day, someone will have a reason for using
> all 64 bits in that field and my Lua app will munge that value.
Yeah. But for many protocols the only things which get that large are lengths, and x86_64 implementations can't address that much memory. 64-bit ARM has that architected tag mode, so they hit the address space wall at ~2^55.
OTOH, 53 is only petabytes, and I know I've moved ~10 terabytes over a single TCP connection before....
I don't know what it is, but the number "53" seems to be cursed for computers. I almost think 5.3 would be a good version number to skip. 5.4 aka 5-death isn't much better.