I don't want to commit to a full-fledged response on this issue (yet),
but:
On the other hand, the mental burden for someone who wants BigInts
in the new system is very low - you'll get a trivial to track
exception.
Assuming that I understand your implication (that ArithmeticExceptions
are trivial to track): that might be true in Java, with checked
exceptions, but it wouldn't be true in Clojure. If some operations
overflow some of the time, you need thorough tests… and for all of the
libraries you use to have thorough tests. It's not a small mental
burden to constantly fear that any library call at all could suddenly
overflow at any time. What are we, C programmers?
Automatic type promotion is a good thing, if not without its quirks
(map behavior being one of them). One of the fantastic things about
Common Lisp is its rich numeric tower.
That said, if we could have speed and safety…
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