On to Hydro

[Ken Kahn]

MarkM wrote:
>E doesn't even have other floating precisions,
> or precision-limited integers.
>
>

That E only has bignums surprised me. It was from you, MarkM, that I thought
I learned that one should be warry of having any primitive operation whose
time and space resource consumption can't be bounded. Have you changed your
mind?

Here is a related story. While I was developing LM-Prolog on Lisp Machines
(circa 1982), one of my users came to me with a simple music program he had
written that was spending almost all its time in the garbage collector. We
spent a lot of time trying to track it down and eventually discovered it was
due to the rational arithmetic where the numerators and denomenators were
bignums.

Best,

-ken