int/long unification hides bugs

[kartik]

Istvan Albert <ialbert at mailblocks.com> wrote in message news:<Hoydnaa6uYCfjuDcRVn-gA at giganews.com>...
> kartik wrote:
> 
> > there seems to be a serious problem with allowing numbers to grow in a
> > nearly unbounded manner, as int/long unification does: it hides bugs.
> 
> No it does not.
> 
> Just because a runaway program stops sooner by hitting the
> integer limit it does not mean that this having this limit
> is a validation method.

i didn't say it is. all i say is that it catches bugs - & that's
valuable.


>  > i feel this is not so important as the quality
>  > of code a programmer writes
> 
> A code that relies on hitting the integer limit
> is anything but high quality.

once again, i'm not relying on the integer limit to catch bugs, but
i'd much rather have bugs exposed by an overflow exception than by end
users complaining about wrong data values.


> If you are worried about some numbers growing too much, then
> check them yourself, you'll get much better results that way.

maybe, why not use an automated test built-in 2 the language? i get it
4 free.

-kartik