[robertlagrant]

Well done. Unsung heroes keeping it all going, and unsung villains who chose int32 in the first place long gone :-)

[ipaddr]

This comment can be reused when int64 is forced to change into int128 or int255 in the future.

[eadmund]

Just use bignums. Seriously, a decent type system can use smaller representations for efficiency and not accidentally break the world.

That way, one can represent the numbers found in cryptography as … numbers, instead of opaque Base64- or (God help one) ASN.1-encoded byte sequences.

Machine words are an efficiency hack.