Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnewsc!lgm
From: lgm@cbnewsc.att.com (lawrence.g.mayka)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Virtues of Lisp syntax
Summary: Common Lisp integers have infinite precision
Message-ID: <1990Sep18.015317.13741@cbnewsc.att.com>
Date: 18 Sep 90 01:53:17 GMT
References: <33709@cup.portal.com> <1990Sep10.091911.20877@hellgate.utah.edu> <PCG.90Sep15203024@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 19

In article <PCG.90Sep15203024@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk>, pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
> is still a problem. Nobody constrains you to have only positive numbers
> as the operands to n-ary fixed point +, so that
> 
> 	(+ -10 +32767 +10)
> 
> is not well defined on a 16 bit machine, unless you do modular
> arithmetic throughout.

Common Lisp integers have infinite precision, so Lisp programmers
don't need to worry about 16-bit machine words vs. 32-bit machine
words.  Rational numbers in Lisp also have infinite precision.


	Lawrence G. Mayka
	AT&T Bell Laboratories
	lgm@iexist.att.com

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