What is the maximum value of a number in Lua?

Question

There doesn\'t seem to be a clear answer to this in the documentation.

I\'m interested in incrementing a variable time that counts the seconds since the

Answer 1

I found this email on the lua users site

The Lua core does not make use of 64 bit datatypes, except implicitly through size_t or ptrdiff_t (which happen to be 64 bit on a 64 bit box).

sizeof( float ) == 4
sizeof( double) == 8

You can define lua_Number to be a double (default), float or any integer with at least 32 bits. There are side effects though and some extensions may cease to work due to the limited range of floats or ints. The core should be fine, though.