Bognumosity

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

    Any vagueness on max size of bignums is no more acceptable
    than it is for arrays or fixnums or floats, all of which have plenty of
    constants defining *their* limits!

    I think we should introduce an INTEGER-LENGTH-LIMIT constant which would be
    the largest value that INTEGER-LENGTH could return.  

Presumably, then we also need a constant called CONS-LIMIT, which is the
maximum allowable length of any list.  After all, someone might want to
use a list of T's and NIL's instead of a bit vector, and it weakens the
standard if we don't tell him exactly how long this list can be.

What we do if someone creates two of these maximum-length lists, or a
maximum-length list of maximum-length lists, I don't know, but we had
better decide, since it will weaken the standard if we are vague about
what is allowed here.  Let's just say that every legal Common Lisp must
have at least N cons cells available to the user at all times, no matter
what he may have used so far, or else it is not a legal Common Lisp.  N
should be at least a million.  Or maybe N should be seven.

A sufficiently tight standard will have no instances.

Maybe the scope of the smiley face at the end of your message was meant
to be the whole message?

-- Scott