Re: bignums are bogus

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

> "Common Lisp in principle imposes no limit on the magnitude of an
> integer.

Note "in principle".

> I don't know of any machine that has an infinitely large amount of memory,
> or even an infinitely large address space.

Practical limits of this sort also apply to things like the maximum number
of conses, the maximum length of a list, etc.  Presumably, you don't think
lists are bogus...

> I expect some implementations of bignums have other constraints as well:
> assuming the number of bigits is a fixnum, storing the bigits in an array
> (limiting the number of bigits to the maximum array size), or similar
> representation-related problems.

Well, if the representation imposes a limit lower than that imposed by
the total storage available we might be justified in saying it is not a
correct implementation.  Of course, we would only be inclined to do this
if the lower limit was relatively small (e.g. number of bigits in a byte).

Now I suppose there'll be hundreds of these messages (at least as many as
about compiling CASE).