alt Hacker News> proof assistants, traditionally, don't use our classic two's complement integers packed into words in our memory, they use Peano numbers
Why can't we just prove theorems about the standard two's complement integers, instead of Nat?
> proof assistants, traditionally, don't use our classic two's complement integers packed into words in our memory, they use Peano numbers
Why can't we just prove theorems about the standard two's complement integers, instead of Nat?
You can. Naturals are the default because the kinds of people who write and use proof assistants think usually in terms of natural numbers first rather than the 2-adic numbers mod 2^N we use in programming, or even the plain 2-adics used for algorithmics. It's like mathematicians and 1-based indexing. It violates programming conventions, but the people using it find it easier.