Re: About big integers in Lua 5.3.

[Tom N Harris <telliamed@...>]

On Thursday, January 14, 2016 03:00:14 PM Chris Berardi wrote:
> I'd be tempted to upgrade the number to some sort of arbitrary precision big
> number (a third number sub-type?) when it overflows an int or float.

This is getting silly.

What if I meant for the number to be an integer with overflow? If the parser is 
trying to guess my intent of whether the value should be an integer, float, or 
error then what do I do if it guesses wrong? When the assumption is error then 
every time I want to guarantee a non-error value will have to be written 
carefully. When the assumption is float then how do I force integer overflow or 
flag loss of precision? The assumption of integer I think is safest because I 
can force a float by adding ".0".

To show some practical examples instead of speaking in vague abstractions, I 
expect the issue will arise when writing number constants in hex. You can have 
the surprise behavior of 9223372036854775808 being less than 
9223372036854775807, or the surprise of 9223372036854775808 not being equal to 
0x80000000000000000000. Programmers working with natural numbers would be 
annoyed by the former, while programmers working with binary data would be 
annoyed by the later.

While making sure that for any number N, N+1 > N makes sense to mathematicians 
that's not how the underlying representation works and ultimately Lua operates 
on number representations, not number theory. We're all familiar with 
0.1+0.1+0.1 not being equal to 0.3. Lua doesn't hide the imprecision of floats, 
nor do I think it should hide the overflow of integers.

-- 
tom <telliamed@whoopdedo.org>