Re: Comment on HAULONG

[JonL at PARC-MAXC]

I'm a little late in commenting on this, but before anything drastic is
done, perhaps the following should be considered:

HAULONG was clearly defined as  "computer" operation.  Attempts to put it
on a mathematical footing apparently only make it more obscure.  It's intent
is to count the number of "informational" bits in two's-complement number,
and it's encoding in MacLisp simply takes the magnitude first, before
"counting" the bits.

Thus I agree with EAK that
    ceiling(log2(abs(integer)+1))
is a poor definition for HAULONG, and my solution would be to abandon
the mathematical-based definition altogether.   I think it would be even
worse to give it a name which implied that it had some such simple
mathematical property.

In general, as we discovered with the problem of printing out bitstrings
"in reverse order", there is a conflict with standard mathematical notation
for integers, and a computer users attempt to bitstrings as integers.

HAULONG stands in the middle of this conflict.