At 12:15 PM 12/3/03 -0500, Jeremy Fincher wrote:
On Wednesday 03 December 2003 11:10 am, Guido van Rossum wrote:
So the question is, does long have operations that int doesn't have? And if so, why can't those operations be added to int? And if there's a reason, is it good enough?
Taking into account their difference in representation, a long can support 1<<32, but an int can't.
Not so. Both '1' and '32' can be represented by int, so only the operation *result* needs to be a long. Further, if the idea here is that 'int' will be a subclass of 'long', then it's perfectly valid to return an int from any operation declared as returning a long. Further, since it's acceptable to *pass* an int for any argument declared 'long', it should suffice to use 'long' for all integer inputs and outputs of methods on 'long'. Anyway, if the idea is that 'long' will be the base class, IMO the name 'long' is confusing. It should probably be called 'integer', with the subclass being either 'int' or 'short'.