Lints, Condate and bugs

[KennyTM~]

On Oct 27, 10 10:26, Walter Bright wrote:
> Ellery Newcomer wrote:
>> Question: would it be feasible to make D use some sort of bignum type
>> as the default index type for arrays, etc, but make it possible for
>> the programmer to use uint or ulong or whatever for e.g. places where
>> performance is an issue?
>
> I suspect that's a big jump in complexity for very little gain.
>
> I also suspect that it would result in a drastic performance problem
> (remember, Python is 100x slower than native code), and will disable the
> advantages D has with type inference (as the user will be back to
> explicitly naming the type).
>

Python is slow because it's interpreted with almost no optimization, not 
because of bignum.

You should try Haskell, which has the built-in Integer type (bignum) and 
Int type (fixed-size integer). The performance drop is at most 20% when 
the size is compatible with Int.

>
>>> I don't think there's much value left for add-on static analysis tools.
>> I went to the trouble of modifying dmd to warn on unsigned/signed
>> comparison. It found me some bugs which probably would not have been
>> noticed otherwise. Did it produce false positives? Yes. Did that make
>> me wish I hadn't done it? Hell no.
>
> You might want to consider changing your coding style to eschew the use
> of unsigned types.
>
>
>> The key idea is leave the warnings off unless the programmer
>> explicitly asks for it.
>
> That's a good sentiment, but it doesn't work that way in practice.
> Warnings always become de-facto requirements. They aren't the solution
> to a disagreement about how the language should work.