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      cool not only for the lisp/bit twiddling, but also because JWZ’s technical posts are rare enough to deserve an upvote anyways.

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        Love the site’s green on black styling, too. Left side of page looks old school without being hard to read.

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      Is there a modern version of this that works across a bunch of lisp installs?

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        I would expect not because the limitation was a bug in the TI lisp machine. The CL implementations I’m familiar with (SBCL, Clisp, CCL) all follow the standard and will happily grow bignums as large as memory allows.

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          Clisp’s implementation notes claim that there is an upper bound:

          BIGNUMs are limited in size. Their maximum size is 32*(2^16-2)=2097088 bits. The largest representable BIGNUM is therefore 2^2097088-1.

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      I love how that 28 year old Common Lisp code looks pretty modern still and should run on most implementations without (too m)any changes.

Stories with similar links:

  1. `MOST-POSITIVE-BIGNUM`: The Biggest Bignum in TI Lisp Machines (2008) via goranmoomin 3 years ago | 14 points | 1 comment