I don't know much about Tcl, but I thought everything was a string, not a float? It appears to work with integers just fine:
$ echo 'puts [expr 2 ** 128 + 1]' | tclsh
340282366920938463463374607431768211457
$ python3 -c 'print(2 ** 128 + 1)'
340282366920938463463374607431768211457
$ node -p 'Math.pow(2, 128) + 1'
3.402823669209385e+38Tcl hasn't been string based for 20 years, misinformation is hard to eliminate. Since the release of version 8.0 in 2001, Tcl internally has value types for integer, bigints, double, boolean, lists, etc.. As long as you're careful not to cause the internal value to 'shimmer' into a string representation, Tcl maintains the value type as last used. Tcl happily converts values to strings as needed, giving the impression of 'everything is a string'.
Re:James Gosling Interview
by martincmartin on Thursday August 12, 2021 @09:49AM
(#28156314)
Yeah good point, I updated my comment. Thanks!
Re:James Gosling Interview
by secondcoming on Thursday August 12, 2021 @08:56AM
(#28155658)
Yes, I couldn't believe Lua chose this path. We have to use Lua scripts with Redis and this conversion stuff concerns me.
Re:James Gosling Interview
by kevin_thibedeau on Thursday August 12, 2021 @12:12PM
(#28158077)
Tcl hasn't been string based for 20+ years. It used boxed objects ever since the bytecode interpreter was added in 8.0.
I don't think this is true of most languages; only for Lua that I know of. And it causes problem: if you send a 64-bit ID to Lua, which represents it as a double, it will subtly change the last few bits. Then when you go to look up something with that ID, you get the wrong item.
Most languages don't have that problem.