Prothon vs. Python integers

[Calvin Spealman]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
> 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.

Seems like it should be possible to implement big numbers in a way that
small numbers are nearly as, as, or more efficient than machine integers,
when you take into account the overflow checking needed for regular
integers in a language like python.