Re: Proposal: Export Data.Word.Word from Prelude

On Sunday, August 24, 2014, Bardur Arantsson wrote:

On 2014-08-24 17:27, Johan Tibell wrote:

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On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Ben Millwood javascript:;> wrote:

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What's left? To those enthusiastically +1-ing this proposal, how will it improve your lives?

Unsigned fixed-width integers appear everywhere in programming and algorithms. Haskell is to my knowledge the only language that doesn't expose such a type next to its signed version.

Java is a notable exception here. Usually the omission leads to pain, but it has to be said that it's mostly just when interfacing with C and/or in parsing binary formats.

Python, JavaScript, Erlang, Ruby, Lua are other exceptions that do not have built-in fixed width wrap-around integer types or unsigned numbers of any kind. Parsing isn't a problem, wraparound is usually emulated with bitwise and. Gets ugly. -bob