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Clarify min/max integer #47

Closed Janiczek closed 4 months ago

Janiczek commented 4 months ago

Hey all, congrats on the launch!

Watching Theo's video getting through the language tour, I wonder whether the section on ints should specify what using JS 64bit floats for ints means.

Coming from Elm world I take it to mean "ints are 53bit" (or 52? can't remember), but I can imagine folks misunderstanding it to be the full 64 bits (as in, MAX_INT = 2^64 - 1 or some such)

Having min/max integers shown in the int lesson would help prevent confusion IMHO.

lpil commented 4 months ago

Hello! The format used to represent ints is documented precisely in the tour here: https://tour.gleam.run/basics/ints/

The details of the double-precision 64-bit format is out of scope for the tour. It would take a great deal of text to explain all the details of this format, and it is not Gleam specific.

Janiczek commented 4 months ago

Yes, that's the page I'm talking about. It feels to me like this change would be helpful:

-ints are represented using JavaScript's 64 bit floating point numbers
+ints are represented using JavaScript's 64 bit floating point numbers, effectively limited to -(2^53 - 1) .. 2^53 - 1

Without needing to explain why that mismatch between 64 and 53 is there.

Anyways I respect your decision as to what level of detail to keep :+1: