From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
To: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 11:08:51 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_RVcFt1On8TbFVWnxh3ST5aGyHwHtPvOhSOVqLjeVRnxQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKH6PiVMydVmrU2iTpEuDwKqgemmdm22ope7kx2UNOCHswawPA@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sun, Sep 11, 2022 at 9:31 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> [Algol 68's presupposition is visible in declarations like "long long
> long ... int". An implementation need support only a limited number of
> "longs",
To clarify things for A68 n00bs, you can *write* an indefinite number of
"longs", but after an implementation-defined point they don't add any
further range (and/or precision in the case of floats). This is true in a
truncated way in C as well, where "long" (which is the same as "long int")
may be the same as "int".
> but each supported variety must have a definite maximum
> value, which is returned by an "environment enquiry" function. For
> amusement, consider the natural idea of implementing the longest
> variety with bignums.]
>
In actual bignum implementations, there is a biggest bignum, but it may not
be possible to actually construct it. In GMP using 64-bit digits, it is
theoretically 2^((2^31 - 1) * (2^64 - 1)), or
2^39,614,081,238,685,424,720,914,939,905, which is Very Big Indeed. But
there is nothing preventing an implementer from watching intermediate
results and throwing an exception if they get too big.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-09-11 15:10 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-09-11 13:30 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-11 15:08 ` John Cowan [this message]
2022-09-11 15:30 ` Bakul Shah
2022-09-11 15:45 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-11 16:20 ` Steve Nickolas
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2022-09-09 19:39 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2022-09-09 20:27 ` Bakul Shah
2022-09-09 21:12 ` Henry Bent
2022-09-09 21:44 ` Dave Horsfall
2022-09-09 18:46 Norman Wilson
2022-09-10 1:35 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-09 17:26 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-09 1:33 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-09 2:12 ` Larry McVoy
2022-09-13 14:23 ` John Foust via TUHS
2022-09-09 2:45 ` George Michaelson
2022-09-16 5:55 ` Marc Donner
2022-09-08 21:16 Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 21:24 ` Dan Halbert
2022-09-08 18:20 Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 19:28 ` Jim Capp
2022-09-08 16:51 [TUHS] " Jon Steinhart
2022-09-08 16:56 ` [TUHS] " Andrew Hume
2022-09-08 17:28 ` Dan Halbert
2022-09-09 0:00 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-09-09 15:49 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-09 18:44 ` Bakul Shah
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