On 05/09/2011 21:27, Leif Linderstam wrote:
My first go at this was that if the result range cannot be represented by any fundamental int type a compile time error is issued. My latest thoughts though are that the library should instead allow for multi-sized integers, which then of course touches on the current work of Christopher Kormanyos. In the original post I said that the range type should accept types as bounds instead of integers; this is the reason. With types there we can specify really big ranges.
A typed approach prevents iterative programming somewhat, since each operation would yield an object of a different type. You can't write a = 0; while(some_cond) a += something; You have to write it as a fold. If it's just to ensure overflow doesn't happen, wouldn't it be better to make all of the checking happen at runtime, and disable it in NDEBUG builds?