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Comment by phoe-krk | Hacker News Reader

Looking at horror stories like this along with their "solutions" that are done by slapping more standard functions on top of the already existing piles, I'm glad that I do my personal programming in languages which 1) have meaningful numeric towers and automatically do promotion/demotion as appropriate, 2) don't implicitly convert signed integers into unsigned integers and error out instead.

With each standard revision, C++ is becoming more and more horrible as much as it strives to become a better and more useful language.

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Pray tell, what are your personal programming languages?

Lisp and Erlang. The latter doesn't have a numeric tower but has automatic bigint conversion and handling. The former is eager to error upon signed/unsigned type violations once you specify them.

Not sure Erlang is strong on the basic types front on the whole though; I've never been a fan of strings in Erlang. Greatly prefer C++ on this front.

Erlang binaries on the other hand are awesome, and the use of lists in what Erlang refers to as chardata/iodata is really nice when generating data that will be written to some kind of output device, since no preprocessing is needed to convert the data to a flat array of bytes. Overall though, yeah, it plays pretty loose with types, though it is generally strict about not using integers where floats are expected and vice versa.

> has automatic bigint conversion

how can one implement this without a branch before literally any arithmetic operation?

Erlang checks for overflow after arithmetic ops are performed internally (IIRC), so you are generally only penalized when overflow actually occurs and requires promotion, which probably isn’t much different in performance from a language that would raise an error on overflow, though obviously not as efficient as a language that just wraps around on overflow.

In CL, you can declare that you need modulo arithmetic, which will give you branchless arithmetic operations.

In Erlang, you don't; the language was never made for that sort of speed.

You're not using Erlang for speed. You're using Erlang for reliability. (Note this is not the same thing as correctness or "safety")

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