Re: About big integers in Lua 5.3.

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2016-01-17 14:20 GMT+02:00 Jorge Visca <xxopxe@gmail.com>:

> 1. The user has his own problems, and it's using a programming
> language to solve them. And the more significantly complex his problem
> is, the less time and energy he will have for other people's problems.

This is a nice philosophical point of view, but the fact is that
users come at different levels of sophistication. A user so
sophisticated as to have need of integers larger than 2^53
(the smallest floating-point integer which satisfies n == n+1)
can reasonably be expected to be conversant with the
representation of numbers in a computer.

Just about every post we get here about things like why
0.1+0.1+0.1 does not equal 0.3 comes from rank newbies, but
just about every post we get about the vagaries of integer
overflow comes from people that know very well what is going
on and are just being contrary.