Bijan Parsia wrote:
> 
> Summary: "An even simpler possibility is to use floating point operations
> for semi-long integers."
> 
> It made me wonder want the impact of a scheme like that would be on
> Squeak. I.e., would some loops benefit? How about all over memory
> consumption? etc.

Unless this has changed recently, Squeak already uses floats for the
integer arithmetic in its pseudorandom number generation.  When I
played with this a couple of years ago, it was definitely much faster
than using ints which overflowed into long ints.  Surprizingly, it was
even faster than ints constrained to a short int range by arbitrarily
reducing the modulus of the arithmetic.  I never fully understood why.

-Jesse