Creating a large integer in Julia

Question

I am learning Julia and I would like to create an object in Julia that contains just a single large integer, for example, 1100000. What I could do is write n = 1.1e6 but then the type of this object is Float64 and if I want to use it as an argument for rand(), I get an error message because the object is not an integer. So instead what I do is as follows.

n = Int64(1.1e6)
rand(n)

But it seems that I am changing the type of the variable here (from Float64 to Int64) and this should be avoided in Julia as far as I understand. Of course I could use n = 1100000 but this is inefficient and difficult to read in my opinion.

Am I changing the type of the variable here? If yes, is this a good way to change the type of the variable or is there a better way to create an integer using scientific notation without having to change the type of the variable?

Any help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

I would write it as:

n = 1_100_000

for me it is more readable than

n = Int(1.1e6)

(or even 1.1e6) but of course it is subjective.

Changing type like in Int(1.1e6) is not a problem in Julia. It will work, as long as passed float represents an integer (otherwise you will get InexactError error).