1 Jun
2009
1 Jun
'09
10:30 p.m.
[I attributed "silly" to your rather nonconstructive argument, not to you.]
Seems like you choose to ignore the key issue here, namely C functions which are limited to native integers. There are still plenty of them in Pike.
For example, one important class of bounded native integers are the sizes of things in memory. If I want a number that in practice always is larger than (and in theory never less than) the size of any pike object, then Pike.NATIVE_MAX is a good choice. Even if it never is passed to any non-bignum C function, using a larger value or Int.inf would just incur unnecessary runtime overhead.