At 11:16 -0400 98/09/15, Philip Wadler wrote:
>If the goal is to make life easy for beginners (and to make it easy to
>avoid overflow errors), shouldn't we generalise *all* uses of Int, so
>that a beginner can use Integer uniformly everywhere, and need never
>know about Int?
The principle I see is that Integer should be the basis for all normal
uses of integers, and Int should only be retained for uses such as time
optimizations and calling C-code (if that is possible) when needed.
The generalization of the Int type, as I see it, is a binary type, a
sequence of bit of fixed length, which has special operations such as
right/left shift with under/overflow, rotations, signed/unsigned arithmetic
and Boolean bit operations.
Hans Aberg
* Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
* Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
* AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>
