Large Integer Literals

Continuing in this series about literals and quoting, let's talk about large integers.

Quick question: how many zeroes are in this number?

100000000000

Past a certain size, it's hard to visually identify the number of digits in a numeric literal. That's why in written language we usually break the number into groups of digits. For instance, in my US locale we would normally split the number into groups of three digits, with commas:

# 100,000,000,000

Thankfully, we can do something similar in Ruby. Ruby lets us insert underscores anywhere we want in integer literals. So we could rewrite this number like so:

100_000_000_000

And I think you'll agree that's a lot easier to visually parse.

That's all for today. Happy hacking!