Re: Using the GNU GMP Library for Bignums in Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> Speak for yourself.  I certainly don't want goto-char or aref to work on
> bignums.  I bed 200 dollars that Emacs will not support buffer sizes or
> array lengths beyond most-positive-fixnum within the next year.

bignums don't make much sense for array sizes and indices, indeed
(except maybe for boolean-vectors), but for buffer sizes they would
allow buffers >512MB (tho still <4GB or likely even <2GB) on 32bit
systems without having to pay for the --wide-int tax.

> To write reasonable programs, programmers need to have reasonable models
> of how computers work and in particular they need to now how data types
> are physically represented.  That's why some programmers want know if a
> sequence is a list or a vector or if a number is a fixnum, a flonum, or
> a bignum.

In case there was still a doubt: I fully agree.


        Stefan