Re: Bognumosity

[Dan Hoey <hoey@nrl-aic.ARPA>]

    Date: Thu, 16 Apr 87 11:11:56 MDT
    From: shebs%orion@cs.utah.edu (Stanley T. Shebs)
    Message-Id: <8704161711.AA01398@utah-orion.ARPA>
    To: common-lisp@sail.stanford.edu

    I think we should introduce an INTEGER-LENGTH-LIMIT constant which
    would be the largest value that INTEGER-LENGTH could return.  It
    should be specifed to be at least as large as
    MOST-POSITIVE-FIXNUM....

Simpler would be to use ARRAY-TOTAL-SIZE-LIMIT for this value.  This is
based on the duality of bignums and bit vectors.  If implementors then
want to represent bignums in some silly way that restricts them, they
can then reduce their advertised ATSL (but not below 1024).

I think a Lisp with 1K-bit bignums would be about as unusable as a lisp
with 1K-element arrays.

Dan