Re: Re: Bignums are bogus?

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>]

> From: Richard Fateman <fateman@edu.berkeley.mike>
> The point about bignums is that you don't have to check for them
> overflowing, because they don't.  Something more dreadful happens first.
> That's why 64bit or 1kbit bignums are no good.

I agree.  Bignums should be analogous to lists; representation based
sublimits on size are acceptable only if they are so large that they are
like running out of memory.  True, arrays and floats have size limits for
individual objects, but why should bignums be analogous to arrays and not
to lists?  Page 13 of Steele says "storage is automatically allocated as
necessary".

It's beginning to seem that this discussion may be even longer than the one
of compiling CASE, perhaps because it's more trivial :-).