>I'm saying that things that don't fly at small scale, don't become good ideas at large scale.
They absolutely do.
Fourier transform multiplication methods are a terrible idea if you run them on numbers that aren't hundreds of digits long, but the only way to multiply truly large numbers.
>Consider something as simple as parsing an integer in a text-based format; there may be whitespace to skip, an optional sign character, and then a loop to accumulate digits and convert them (itself a subtraction, multiply, and add), and there's still the questions of all the invalid cases and what they should do.
^[ *][-?][0-9][0-9]*[ *]$
You're welcome. Anything that passes that regex is a valid number. Now using that as a basis of a lexer means that you can store any int in whatever precision you feel like.
It's unfortunate that the majority of programmers these days are so computer illiterate that they can't write a parser for matching parens and call you an elitist for pointing out this is something anyone with a year of programming should be able to do in their sleep.
Which is neither beautiful nor very enlightening.