Re: Checking for loss of information on integer conversion

[Paul Eggert]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I don't think adding actual bignums via (say) libgmp would be
> significantly harder than adding such "small bignums.

Although I suspect libgmp would be considerably more of a pain than small 
bignums (e.g., due to the memory-allocation hassle) I agree we should spend our 
limited development time on true bignums rather than on small ones. Emacs 
already links to libgmp so this shouldn't introduce any new dependencies. 
However, this is all a matter for a later day.

> On 64bit systems (and 32bit systems built with wide-ints),
> I don't see such a clear need to convert a large integer into a float,
> so on those systems I think it's OK to just signal an error.

I'll take a look into doing things that way, and into following Eli's suggestion 
to make it configurable.