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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Q: most-positive-fixnum and array-dimension-limit
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Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 20:14:52 GMT
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In article <poeck-2011942039290001@wi6a65.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de> poeck@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de (Karsten Poeck) writes:
>In one of favourite Common Lisp evironments we found that
>most-positive-fixnum is 2**15 -1 and
>array-dimension-limit is 2**31 -1.
>
>CLTLII states in chapter 12.10 that
>X3J13 vote 76 specified that the value of array-dimension-limit must be fixnum.
>
>Has this vote made it into the coming standard?
>Can we complain loudly at the vendoor?
>most-positive-fixnum of 2**15 -1 is anyhow sort of strange
>for a 32 bit environment.

It's completely reasonable for the value of array-dimension-limit
to be restricted to fixnums.  Do you really want to have to worry
about bignums when iterating over arrays?

What's unreasonable in a 32-bit env is to have 16-bit fixnums.
What is this losing Common Lisp?

-- jd
