Re: Var is dead! Long Live CheckedPtrVar and IntegerVar!

[Michael McClary <michael>]

> From: roger (Roger Gregory)
> 
> Not so.  IntegerVars DO have to do bignum stuff so all that behaviou shit
> can be rolled into the bignum stuff.

I had thought they were going to do something like that eventually (switching
to bignum behavior by mashing the vtable pointer), but markm's message gave
me the impression that this option had just been closed off.

How can they do bignum stuff if they're not Heapers, and don't have a vtable
pointer?  (I suppose they could HOLD a heaper, and contain a switch...)

> There is little reason that the disk and communication formats of IntegerVars
> should be the same as the internal format, certainly the communication formats
> can vary with the rev of the communication protocol.

The aren't (although the non-verbose forms should be close).  The point
is that, if information must be exchangable between machines of different
archetectures, it can't have legal values which can only be expressed on
some of the archetectures.

	michael