From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   On Sun, 1 Sep 2024 11:07:17 +0100, mm0fmf wrote:   
      
   > Or you were programming in C on an Analog Devices SHARC were char was 32   
   > bits.   
      
   I was watching a video clip the other day which talked about the Symbolics   
   3600 Lisp Machine from the 1980s. This one had core Lisp constructs like   
   garbage collection and arbitrary-precision integers programmed into its   
   microcode.   
      
   When they came to implement a C compiler, they didn’t bother defining   
   finite-precision integers for it: they just had it use the arbitrary-   
   precision ones, since they were already available in the machine   
   instruction set. The “sizeof” operator did return small, fixed values for   
   types, but for integers, they were essentially meaningless.   
      
   Somebody wrote a test program to determine how large an integer was, by   
   initializing a variable to 1 and left-shifting it until it overflowed and   
   went to zero.   
      
   The program ran for over an hour, exhausted all the available memory, and   
   crashed.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)