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Comment by marvinborner | Hacker News Reader

In general I think you're right. With the correct encoding, it's just a mechanical limit.

It just depends on the specific encoding you use. GMP, I believe, is only limited by the physical memory size. Python's implementation is also limited by the encoding (not sure how it works concretely, but it doesn't seem to be a memory overflow):

  x = 1
  while True:
      x <<= x
  > OverflowError: too many digits in integer

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Right, my argument is that the smaller int/float/etc. types are also mechanically limited in size.

And at least for most languages, the size limit has somewhat intuitive upper size limits. JavaScript has the odd case where larger numbers start skipping in different ways. (If my memory is accurate, at least.)

> With the correct encoding, it's just a mechanical limit

This also applies to small numbers and small mechanical limits. Of course, here the small limits come with the nice side effect of efficiency :)

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