Runar Jordahl explains how the mainstream languages solve problems - they make your life more complicated.

Visual Studio now has the "new" feature Big Integers . Of course you have to declare a number up front to be “big”: There is no automatic overflow mechanism. You just have an exception.

Try this in Smalltalk:

1000 factorial.

Now try the equivalent in C# or Java, and make sure it can work with arbitrary integers that may exist in standing code.

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