> Alastair Reid wrote:
>
> > I've recently been toying with representing of Integer and Rational
> > literals by strings all the way through the compiler to the code
> > generator.
Olivier Lefevre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> teased:
> Won't this turn Hugs into a Tcl (pre-8.0)?
I was choosing my words very carefully. When I said:
> all the way through the compiler to the code generator.
I wasn't suggesting that we'd use strings at runtime. The runtime
system will use the usual 32 or 64 bit representations for Int,
Float and Double and will use the GNU multi-precision integer library
for Integer.
It'd be nice to use the GNU multi-precision rational
library too (to implement Rational) - but I'm not sure if this
is allowed by the Haskell report. (My worry is that Rational is
defined as a synonym for "Ratio Integer" instead of being an
abstract data type. If so, then this'd be a shame since no-one
ever uses Ratio Int or any of the other possibilities.)
Alastair
