While current existing numeric opcodes are limited to 4 bytes, new
opcodes may need different limits.
This mimics Bitcoin Core commit 99088d60d8a7747c6d1a7fd5d8cd388be1b3e138
This commit implements a new type, named scriptNum, for handling all
numeric values used in scripts and converts the code over to make use of
it. This is being done for a few of reasons.
First, the consensus rules for handling numeric values in the scripts
require special handling with subtle semantics. By encapsulating those
details into a type specifically dedicated to that purpose, it
simplifies the code and generally helps prevent improper usage.
Second, the new type is quite a bit more efficient than big.Ints which
are designed to be arbitrarily large and thus involve a lot of heap
allocations and additional multi-precision bookkeeping. Because this
new type is based on an int64, it allows the numbers to be stack
allocated thereby eliminating a lot of GC and also eliminates the extra
multi-precision arithmetic bookkeeping.
The use of an int64 is possible because the consensus rules dictate that
when data is interpreted as a number, it is limited to an int32 even
though results outside of this range are allowed so long as they are not
interpreted as integers again themselves. Thus, the maximum possible
result comes from multiplying a max int32 by itself which safely fits
into an int64 and can then still appropriately provide the serialization
of the larger number as required by consensus.
Finally, it more closely resembles the implementation used by Bitcoin
Core and thus makes is easier to compare the behavior between the two
implementations.
This commit also includes a full suite of tests with 100% coverage of
the semantics of the new type.
