"Pascal Obry" wrote in message news:1396545517.12456.30.camel@pascal.home.net... >Le mercredi 02 avril 2014 à 23:27 -0700, Jeffrey Carter a écrit : >> On 04/02/2014 10:51 PM, Pascal Obry wrote: >> > >> > But again this is doable today in Ada (even 1983) with a library and >> > proper overriding of the operators. >> >> Well, no. Unbounded_Integer would work like any other integer type. You >> wouldn't >> have to convert literals or named numbers: >> >> I : Unbounded_Integer := 1E1000; > >Ok, some little annoyance indeed. Very little, with proper operator definitions I : Unbounded_Integer := +1E1000; works today. And it would be pretty simple to provide an aspect for allowing literals for a private type. But there is no advantage to supporting it as a built-in type - and it would have a significant cost, the elimination of practical generic sharing. (If built-in integers could use an "unbounded" type, then all integer math in a shared generic body would have to use that math. In which case, performance would be dismal. Even supporting 64-bit integers on a 32-bit machine would have a version of that effect, but of course no where near as severe.) Randy.