addition for any finite data types isnt closed because it overflows

so addition in code always ends up being addition mod n

and on top of that division isnt closed on integers so they just truncate it

thats why i love programming because it has that hacky polymorphic nature that says fuck you to high school algebra and says hello to the creativity of modern algebra

nothing from high school survives

Python says otherwise.

(just in case you think I'm not serious - python has arbitrary precision on integers, meaning operations don't over/underflow)

This post was edited by Klexmoo on Jan 8 2019 09:03am

this is fascinating, thank you for bringing this to my attention.

i found this page that goes in to depth on the subject (in a super clean and informative way too)
https://mortada.net/can-integer-operations-overflow-in-python.html

but i still standby my initial statement, because arbitrary precision doesnt fit in the category of "finite data types" it instead ends up being more like a string that can go up in size. really cool though.

Yeah it's a bit hacky (in the sense that it's not really treated as a number) but cool

welp i guess the standard addition operation does survive through pythons arbitrary precision, dang i really wanted high school to be dead

It's hardly something used for performance reasons though. It uses up a lot of memory and is super slow compared to operations on 64 bit C integers like numpy uses.