That said, I once considered the possibility of having a
PositiveSmallInteger and a NegativeSmallInteger just for the sake of
unifying the sign/magnitude handling.
I would really like to see if this is better, because I have the
impression that it could take advantage of dispatch.
Stef
But, let's imagine that it can pay..
We can also transpose this to collections - ByteArray
ShortIntegerArray WordArray with signed/unsigned variants -
without resorting to VM considerations...
Are we sure that Smalltalk implementation (image side) would be
simpler than Swift with all the double dispatching machinery involved?
So, if the goal of having such space/time optimization is founded
(which we can't know without context), I would say Swift does not
do it that bad...
Some languages are much worse, like say:
https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/display/c/INT32-C.+Ensure+that+operations+on+signed+integers+do+not+result+in+overflow
;)
Thx for the share. Enlightment doesn't come easy.
Remember that a lot of code in this world is still COBOL...
Phil
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> Sven
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