Prothon vs. Python integers

[Mark Hahn]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
> On Tue, 25 May 2004 17:59:20 -0700, Mark Hahn wrote:
>
>> I've agreed to adding longs.  I'm thinking of only having longs.
>
> It's more efficient if ints which fit in a machine word (or a machine
> word minus one or two bits used for tagging them as ints) are
> represented as such, rather than using a generic big int
> representation.
>
> It doesn't mean they should be treated differently in the language.
> It can be a hidden implementation detail, visible only for those who
> write extensions in C.

I've already implemented the new ints in Prothon.  They behave as normal
ints until an overflow occurs and then they are treated as a bigint.  There
is no performance penalty at all because I have to check for overflow
anyway.

C extension coders see no difference unless they want to deal with bigints.
Macros provide access to the ints and if they ask for a normal size int that
is actually a bigint it just throws an excepton.