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From: Tim Rentsch
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: widening multiplication
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2020 07:42:08 -0700
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Richard Damon writes:
> On 8/22/20 1:04 PM, David Brown wrote:
>
>> On 22/08/2020 17:59, Malcolm McLean wrote:
>>
>>> On Saturday, 22 August 2020 at 15:17:01 UTC+1, Richard Damon wrote:
>>>
>>>> I would say your 'most' is a bit inaccurate or misleading, unless you
>>>> really do mean that most languages do worst.
>>>>
>>>> The ones that do 'better' than C in this would be:
>>>>
>>>> 1) Languages with dynamic typing, where integer math automatically
>>>> converts to higher/arbitrary precision types. These get around the
>>>> problem by defining it away, there is no type like int32_t
>>>
>>> So that's pretty much every high level language, scripting language,
>>> mathematical language.
>>
>> > Comparison_of_programming_languages_(basic_instructions)#Integers>
>>
>> Of course that is not a complete list of languages by any means. But it
>> gives a rough idea. And while there is clearly a correlation between
>> higher level languages having support for "big numbers", it is not
>> remotely as clear-cut as you seem to think. Many of the "high-level"
>> and "scripting" languages there have big numbers as a standard library
>> type in addition to fixed-size integer types that are used more generally.
>
> Looking at that list, only Python 3. Erlang, Mathmatica, and Wolfram
> meet that requirement. [...]
You left out Smalltalk, which had automatic conversion to
arbitrary precision ten years or so before the others. (The
predecessor to Mathematica, SMP, may have been only a few
years after Smalltalk.)