Mattias Engdegård wrote:

>>It's not a bug -- you're relying on 32bit ints when OCaml has only
>>31bit ints (on 32-bit arch). In C (for example), if you use a plain
>>int (I believe it'll default to signed), you get the exact same
>>behaviour when the number overflows 2^31.
>>    
>>
>
>(Signed overflow is not legal in C (undefined behaviour), and a decent
>compiler will warn this can be detected statically.)
>
>Of course it is a bug - a design bug, since the behaviour is intended
>and documented, but still a bug. But getting numbers, even integers,
>right in every respect is hard, and involves trade-offs between
>performance, correctness and convenience.
>
>I would love to have a fast unboxed integer type that automatically
>overflows to bignum, but it would be a tad slower than the current "int".
>  
>

I find it interesting that the languages I know use fixed-size integers 
(Ocaml, C, C++, Java, C#, Fortran, Pascal) are at or near the top of the 
great computer language shootout, while the languages I know don't 
(Perl, Python) are near the bottom.  Not that I'm saying that this is 
the case, it's just an interesting dichotomy.

Brian