[discuss what tcl considers a variable of type wide]

An expr function that converts a number to a "wide integer" (i.e. an integer of at least 64-bits precision).

expr { wide(value) }

As JH observes on comp.lang.tcl, if you want a wide result, be sure to apply wide to one of the values in the expression - not the result of the expression.

In other words, this will not give you a wide result:

expr {wide( 80 * 1000000000 )}

while this will:

expr {wide( 80 ) * 1000000000 }

Of course, this applies to Tcl 8.4 and earlier. With Tcl 8.5, the expression works without the wide as all integers are considered to be of logically infinite width (and occupy as much space at the implementation level as needed to achieve this).

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