On 12/28/12 9:21 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
On Saturday, 29 December 2012 at 02:14:22 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Saturday, December 29, 2012 02:18:36 Peter Alexander wrote:
I'd be very strongly inclined to go with #4 and just say that anyone who
actually cares about numbers that large should use 64-bit. Needing
ranges of
length greater than uint.max is definitely not the norm, and I would
expect
people caring that much about computational stuff to be using 64-bit
anyway,
since odds are they'll need the memory. Allowing for length to be
anything
other than size_t is extremely annoying for generic code.
Sorry, I don't think I was clear on what the issue is.
I'm already assuming 64-bit. What I'm saying is that 64-bit sometimes
isn't even enough (for example in the case of a permutations range). I'm
asking if allowing length to return BigInt would be reasonable.
I think it would complicate a lot of things for the benefit of a few cases.
Andrei
