Re: documentation of integers, fixnums and bignums

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I think it's important for the Lisp programmers to
> know what kind of objects they could get as return values.  Maybe in
> some distant future we will no longer care about the difference
> between fixnums and bignums, but as of now, we still do.

When Lisp programmers care about object types, they should care only whether the 
objects are integers. From a type point of view programmers shouldn't care 
whether an integer is small or large, any more than they should care whether a 
vector is small or large. Occasionally for pragmatic reasons it may make sense 
to point out that an integer might be large or not, just as it occasionally may 
make sense to point out that a vector might be large or not. But this should be 
the exception, not the typical case.

What you see as "some distant future" I see as happening before the next 
release, by the way. Perhaps that explains why you're more in favor of 
documenting the current not-yet-finished situation, whereas I'm more in favor of 
keeping the documentation simple and implementing it that way.