Kurt Stephens

OCaml uses a similar type tagging system as Ruby, in that it also sets the lower bit to 1 on Fixnum-like values.
However, on modern CPU’s; this doesn’t slow math down that much as you don’t really need to do the bit shifting,
as you can read in the link below:

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/ocaml-internals/

Your approach does speed up integer caluclations a bit, but is also slows down pointer access, because now pointers cannot be used “as is” anymore. For an OOP language that usually uses heaps of references between objects, I think that may be a more serious problem. Also, how would you go at encoding Symbols?