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The Numbers Mini-Language

The Numbers Mini-Language — cover art: a hedgehog accountant in a green eyeshade and shirtsleeves at a candlelit ledger desk, sorting small wooden tiles of abstract numeric shapes — discs, slashes, dots, hash-marks — into neat stacks for binary, hex, scientific, and complex numbers, with a long brass ledger and a small abacus to one side. 🤓

2005 · Drunken Blog Rants · Essay

“A language with easy-to-use fixnums and hard-to-use bignums is encouraging programmers to flirt with disaster.”
— From The Numbers Mini-Language, January 2005
Read the essay

© 2005 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Drunken Blog Rants.

Author’s note

This one of my very oldest posts: a fun walk through a bunch of stuff you just don't need to know anymore. It turns out representing numbers in programs is quite complicated and fiddly, and different programming languages give you varying levels of expressiveness and risk. But it's mostly a curiosity at this point, unless you are doing high-performance systems programming.

AI Notes

Steve picks the smallest possible corner of language design — how do you write a number? — and lays six languages side by side on scientific notation, underscores, hex, binary, complex numbers, and arbitrary-precision integers. The variation is wider than working programmers tend to realise. Perl's underscore-evaporation rules are deliberately perverse (2_____.____0___5__________ equals 2.05). C, C++ and Java have no binary literals at all and no grouping separator. Python, Ruby, Common Lisp and Scheme auto-promote through a numeric tower so overflow is a non-issue. Java's BigInteger is so hostile its constructor takes a signum and a big-endian byte array. Then the survey becomes an argument: a language that ships with easy fixnums and painful bignums has, whether or not anyone notices, shipped a default the working programmer will follow — and that default is where the integer-overflow bugs come from, and where a class of security vulnerabilities comes from. The fix is syntactic: make correctness the easy thing to type, and let optimisation be opt-in.

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