Re: Proposal: shorthand syntax for initializing arbitrary-precision("bigint") numbers?

Hi Tyson, tyson andre wrote:

What are your thoughts on making 123_456_000_000_000_000_000_000n a shorthand for gmp_init('123456000000000000000000') (or a call with equivalent results) (similar to existing backtick string syntax is a shorthand for shell_exec())

We could do that, but maybe this is a good opportunity to do something with a wider benefit than GMP by having a generalised solution? GMP is already special in some ways and it would be a shame to have even more functionality that privileges it. For example, what if we allowed string prefixes to have special user-defined meanings, like: n"123_456" // expands to: gmp_init('123_456') u"foo bar" // expands to: new UnicodeString("foo bar") (some class I made up) d"123.456" // expands to: new Decimal("123.456") (also an imaginary class) This would be a similar idea to JavaScript's template string tags: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Template_literals How you'd define the mappings from prefixes to executed code, I'm not sure, but we could just make it call a function by that name in the current namespace… though that would prompt the question “why not just write d("123.456"), which is already possible?” and I don't have a good answer to that :) Regards, Andrea