Re: Checking for loss of information on integer conversion

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> It's not a minor cosmetic limitation, it's a basic inability to line
> up text displayed with a variable-pitch font.  It makes Emacs look
> ugly and basically unusable when variable-pitch fonts are used to
> display program source code, formatted text, tables, etc.  These are
> all important and frequent use cases these days.
>
> By contrast, silently returning a wrong result due to overflow is a
> much more rare situation, especially since today 64-bit machines are
> so ubiquitous.

In any case, the relative importance doesn't matter: we all agree that
both are problems that deserve fixing; and I think it's unlikely that
the relative order we place them will influence which gets fixed first
(which depends rather on who decides to scratch which itch first).

Personnally, my money is on libgmp being implemented first (to a large
extent because I don't think anyone even has a clear idea of what
a solution to the variable-pitch-alignment problem would look like (in
terms of API and code, not in terms of visual display, of course)).


        Stefan