title: Limits of Nat type in Shapeless
body: <p>In shapeless, the Nat type represents a way to encode natural numbers at a type level. This is used for example for fixed size lists. You can even do calculations on type level, e.g. append a list of <code>N</code> elements to a list of <code>K</code> elements and get back a list that is known at compile time to have <code>N+K</code> elements.</p>
  
  <p>Is this representation capable of representing large numbers, e.g. <code>1000000</code> or 2<sup>53</sup>, or will this cause the Scala compiler to give up?</p>