>But in Ruby, there's no overwrap between Fixnums and Bignums (on
	>purpose), so that
	>
	>  1073741823[2] = 1  # error! Fixnum
	>  1073741824[2] = 1  # ok! Bignum
	>
	>would be confusing.  I think we should introduce BitArray or something
	>for that purpose.

It wouldn't be so confusing if you could explictly create
a new Bignum:

	bucket = Bignum.new(200)

Could make a bit array starting off as 200 bytes long.  I suppose
it could be accidently coerced to a Fixnum if it were too small,
but I'd rather see bit access as part of the existing classes
instead of creating another one if possible.

/\ndy


--
Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.
Innovative Object-Oriented Software Development
web:   http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com   email: andy / pragmaticprogrammer.com