int/long unification hides bugs

[kartik]

aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) wrote in message news:<1gm98e3.ewsm1jxg9y3tN%aleaxit at yahoo.com>...
> 
> Try doing some accounting in Turkish liras, one of these days.  Today,
> each Euro is 189782957 cents of Turkish liras.  If an Italian firm
> selling (say) woodcutting equipment bids on a pretty modest contract in
> Turkey, offering machinery worth 2375220 Euros, they need to easily
> compute that their bid is 450776275125540 cents of Turkisk Liras.  And
> that's a _pretty modest_ contract, again -- if you're doing some
> computation about truly substantial sums (e.g. ones connected to
> government budgets) the numbers get way larger.
> 
> Even just for
> accounting, unlimited-size integers are simply much more practical.

Thank you for the information. I appreciate it.
-kartik