Re: integer overflow handling for most-negative-fixnum

[Paul Eggert]

Andy Moreton wrote:

> Bignums are not relevant to this discussion.

I'm afraid they are. Whatever solution we come up with in this problem, should 
be compatible with bignums. Our solution should not assume that integers are of 
fixed width.

> Non base10 representations
> of emacs fixnums are not treated consistently, and prevent round trip
> handling of the full range of valid fixnum values.

As Helmut mentioned, read and print work just fine. The problem is that if you 
use some formats, you don't get a round trip. Of course this problem is endemic 
to formats; e.g., (read (format "%g" X)) does not yield X for all floating-point 
values X, due to rounding. Still, it would be helpful if the usual kind of 
formatting hex integers were round-trip more often. I'll propose something along 
these lines in my next email.