Ranges longer than size_t.max

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/28/12 9:21 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
> On Saturday, 29 December 2012 at 02:14:22 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Saturday, December 29, 2012 02:18:36 Peter Alexander wrote:
>> I'd be very strongly inclined to go with #4 and just say that anyone who
>> actually cares about numbers that large should use 64-bit. Needing
>> ranges of
>> length greater than uint.max is definitely not the norm, and I would
>> expect
>> people caring that much about computational stuff to be using 64-bit
>> anyway,
>> since odds are they'll need the memory. Allowing for length to be
>> anything
>> other than size_t is extremely annoying for generic code.
>
> Sorry, I don't think I was clear on what the issue is.
>
> I'm already assuming 64-bit. What I'm saying is that 64-bit sometimes
> isn't even enough (for example in the case of a permutations range). I'm
> asking if allowing length to return BigInt would be reasonable.

I think it would complicate a lot of things for the benefit of a few cases.

Andrei