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From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: best CL type for fixed decimal values
Date: 2000/03/03
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* Robert Monfera <monfera@fisec.com>
| OTOH, a lot of real-life, "mainstream" problems cannot be solved with
| fixnums of some implementations or even worse, the ANSI lower limit of 16
| bits.

  the important part about fixnums is not how big they are, but how they
  interact with other implementation limits in the language.  e.g., array
  indices are all fixnums.  allowing bignums for array indices is a bad
  idea.  it is therefore valuable to have a type which is already necessary
  in the language explicitly available for similarly constrained operations.

#:Erik