On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 01:48:49PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > > >First, there are basic native types such > >as num, int, and string, which I'm perfectly fine with. But what bothers > >me is the fact that bigint's and bignum's are being given a special place > >in the vtable. > > Why? They're base types, really. I'd like to add in support for > complex numbers too, but I've not yet gone that far. Might next week, > you never know.
Why? Why should complex numbers be base types? Why should bigint's and bignum's be given special treatment? (I understand Brent's point that you want to overflow to bigint's and bignum's, but that doesn't require special treatment, only that they be available for creation.) If parrot is supposed to be fully extensible then let it "eat it's own dog food". It should use the extensibility it offers to others to implement it's own extensions. Any special treatment of extra internal types implies that that special treatment isn't available to types added at runtime. Tim [not really paying attention so possibly ranting needlessly]
