Using 64-bit integers (was Re: exists $foo[7] and delete $foo[7])

["Matthias Urlichs" <smurf@noris.net>]

Hi,

Mark-Jason Dominus writes:
: Could you explain why?  Because I don't understand the cruciality, and
: it seems like a very bad idea to me.
> : > We're officially in the beta-building phase now, and I'm going to
> : > focus on making 5.5.64 as feature-complete as possible to call it
> : > a beta.
>
... and if it wants to be feature-complete, then an array-as-hash should
afford all operations on it a 'real' hash does; thus if you want to support
exists() and delet() operations on them, you need them for arrays.

Personally, I think it's great that somebody noticed this problem.


NB, as to feature-completeness: Does anybody have time to compile perl
with 64-bit integers and not-long doubles (on a 32-bit system of course),
and then fix all the test cases (an awful lot of them, I'm afraid)?
I would like to do that very much, but I just don't have the time.  :-(
I started last week, but it's too much work.

The first thing which breaks is Perl's lexer. It insists on converting all
numbers into floats first, which doesn't work if the float doesn't have
enough bits. That's not only ugly, it's also inefficient.

The second problem, IMHO, is that newer systems have strto{,l}{d,l}
instead of ato{l,lf,i}. GNU libc, in fact, has strtold but no atolf,
which means that most of the testcases still fail, even if you do use
long double.

-- 
Matthias Urlichs  |  noris network GmbH   |   smurf@noris.de  |  ICQ: 20193661
The quote was selected randomly. Really.    |      http://www.noris.de/~smurf/
-- 
An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of a ghost) must
be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
                                -- Charles Dickens

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References to:

Mark-Jason Dominus <mjd@plover.com>
Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>

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