Dear Steven,
there are no integers in Ruby, only Fixnum and Bignum.
The conversion is automatical.
Matz, Ruby’s creator, says that you should use these without
caring about their internal representation.
You can find some detail on this website:
_O'Reilly Media - Technology and Business Training
(http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/01/the_ruby_value_1.html)
If you want to know how many bytes are used to represent a
number, you can use
puts 1.size => 4 bytes on my machine
puts 1.class => Fixnum
puts (23000).size => 376 bytes on my machine.
puts (23000).class => Bignum
Best regards,
Axel