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From: Kaz Kylheku <k...@kylheku.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: bignums in clisp
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:48:15 +0000 (UTC)
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On 2012-09-28, Barry Margolin <bar...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> In article <k44gnl$o3...@news.ox.ac.uk>,
>  Ian Clifton <ian.clif...@chem.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Sam Steingold <s...@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> >> * ((( 1/f ))) <snqr...@tznvy.pbz> [2012-09-12 02:34:46 -0700]:
>> >>
>> >> I wanted to know how big the numbers could be for calculation, and I was
>> >> under the assumption that one could go anywhere as long as the computer
>> >> didn't crash. It appears that the limit is:
>> >>
>> >> 2^2097089 - 1 and any command will overflow beyond that. I just
>> >> calculated the
>> >> number of digits roughly in my version of clisp ( 2.48) running on a
>> >> linux box:
>> >
>> > the limits are documented here:
>> > http://www.clisp.org/impnotes/num-concepts.html#num-const
>> 
>> Wow, I never realised that (in clisp) long-floats can represent even
>> bigger numbers than bignums.
>
> But not to with as much precision.

They are not "bigger", just more, err, "magnitudinous"!

Bigger means, strictly, occupying more RAM. :)