> This is exactly the kind of minutiae that GP was bemoaning.
How is this “minutiae”? You should always know the possible range of a numeric variable or field when you create it, so why not just write what size it is? In Rust the main numeric types look like this: i32, u64, u8. You just pick the one you want.
A float in Python is an implementation-specific size, just like C. So I'm really confused about using it as an example here.
> Storage classes are "minutiae" however when all you want is just a straight up number.
You can have a single "straight up number" and mention the bit width in the language spec. The mere act of writing it down doesn't force coders to deal with any more minutiae than they already had to deal with.
> Yeah by way of higher-level abstractions ...
I strongly object to this. "float is at least x bits" and "float is exactly x bits" are the same level of abstraction, and almost every language, high or low level, picks one of those options.
You could apply that same "who cares?" attitude to the size of "double" in C. Whether you burden yourself with that knowledge is not a feature of the language. More "C coders" care because they're micro-optimizing, but it's no more needed in C than Python.
Also you named Java as being on the easy side and that has four different integer sizes...
This is exactly the kind of minutiae that GP was bemoaning.
> If anything it pushes code to a slightly lower level
Yeah by way of higher-level abstractions ...