11 Sep
2022
11 Sep
'22
9:30 p.m.
On Sep 11, 2022, at 6:30 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
[Algol 68's presupposition is visible in declarations like "long long
long ... int". An implementation need support only a limited number of
"longs", but each supported variety must have a definite maximum
value, which is returned by an "environment enquiry" function. For
amusement, consider the natural idea of implementing the longest
variety with bignums.]
It would be natural to use a Kleene star to represent an arbitrarily
long string of LONGs -- "long* int" -- though AFAIK Algol68 doesn't
do bignums. Weirdly even most 21st century progamming languages do
not provide built-in support for bignums!
C's INT_MAX, LONG_MAX etc are kind of an environment enquiry...