Re: an alternate BOGUS-FIXNUMS proposal

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>]

Date: Wed, 13 Jul 88 09:52:31 MDT
 From: sandra <(Sandra J Loosemore)sandra%cdr@edu.utah.cs>

> Gail Zacharias has suggested an alternate proposal on this issue.

> I suppose a proposal along these lines would be a better than the
> status quo.  However, I do see some problems:

I don't mind proposals that make fixnums more portable.  Do you still
think they should be eliminated instead?  Perhaps we should look at
what languages like C say about "short", "int", and "long".  (Very
little is promised, as I recall.)

> - Forcing users to DEFTYPE their own integer subrange types instead
>   would encourage better use of data abstraction.  I've noticed that 
>   Lisp programs are typically much sloppier about this than programs
>   written in strongly typed languages such as C or Pascal.

Well, I for one do not want to figure out exactly what range I need in
every case.  And in some cases I may not know an exact range.  What I
want is more or less soemthing that says "give me an int (as in C,
say), not a BIGNUM".

I'm not sure just what aspects of C and Pascal programs you have in
mind.  There are certainly many programs that use "int" or "long", and
those are analogous to FIXNUM, not to explicit ranges of integers or
numbers of bits.

-- Jeff