Hi Mark,

| Yes, big integers is the other possibility.  I'm trying to do it as
| light weight as possible, and yet keeping the user interface
| "conventional" (using the classic types so that integer literals
| supplied by the user do not have to be wrapped with 'Int').  However,
| the HOL Zero natural number syntax functions already use big integers,
| and so there is already an inconsistency in style here, and so maybe I
| should follow your suggestion.

I rely quite heavily on the OCaml Num library for various things in
HOL Light's arithmetic decision procedures. But I am a bit reluctant
to introduce a dependency on this library into the logical kernel.
It's pretty big and complicated, and I have found one or two bugs in
it in the past (admittedly many years ago). Since the overflow is a
bit of a theoretical rather than practical problem, I'm inclined to
stick to the devil I know, machine arithmetic, or perhaps just use
int64. (As Makarius pointed out, even the unary representation with
unit lists has its issues too in OCaml.) But thinking through the
implications here together has certainly been valuable, I think.

John.

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