Re: view/edit large files

[Miles Bader]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> Yes, we do return a float for size.  But for some attributes, like
> inode, floats are not a good idea, because inodes are habitually
> compared for exact equality.  I'm not sure time values need that
> measure of accuracy, though.

"floats" can exactly represent integers if the integer quantity fits
within the mantissa.  For an IEEE double, that's 52 bits, which is
enough for many uses (for an inode number, I'm not sure -- obviously
it's enough for 32-bit inode numbers, but possibly not some 64-bit
numbers ... OTOH, neither is a cons of integers).

Requiring emacs platforms to support double-precision floats is probably
pretty safe these days, but I suppose it's the sort of thing people
could argue about...

-Miles

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