[self-interest] Unlimited integer arithmetics?

[tb at becket.net]

Randy Smith <randall.smith at sun.com> writes:

> Do you thing that unlimited integer arithmetics is (from practical point of
> view) usable? Is not 64-bit integers good enough for every purpouses?

64-bit integers suck rocks.

Here are some things for which they suck:

Times, in a *real* resolution (like, oh, say the resolution our
computers actually give us, for some processors *nanoseconds*)

Universal addressing, for which you essentially need: number of
  network addresses in the world * number of bytes on a machine.  The
  width of an IPv6 address is six bytes.  64-bit integers would leave
  only two bytes to address my data.  Since I could easily have well
  over a terabyte of storage at a reasonable cost, this is ludicrous.
  Instead, we have six bytes of network address *plus* at least
  another six bytes to index local storage.