OT (partially): about promotion of integers

[Walter Bright]

On 12/11/2012 8:35 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Besides, at the end of the day, a half-approach would be to have a
>> widest-signed-integral and a widest-unsigned-integral type and only play
>> with those two.

Why stop at 64 bits? Why not make there only be one integral type, and it is of 
whatever precision is necessary to hold the value? This is quite doable, and has 
been done.

But at a terrible performance cost.

And, yes, in D you can create your own "BigInt" datatype which exhibits this 
behavior.