Please quote carefully

[TVR%CCRMA-F4 at SAIL.Stanford.EDU]

Please be careful you know who you're quoting when you attribute something
to me or anyone else.  As you can see below, that wasn't what i wrote at
all, nor was it that easily confused (as some quotes and responses seem to
be these days). For the record, the author of this quote was Rex Black
<black at ee.UCLA.EDU>, and the subject was "Re: UNIX-WIZARDS Digest V3#065",
which was sufficiently uninformative as to encourage me to leave out the
header altogether.  By the way, it should be noted that some folks receive
some non-UUCP messages individually and thus the subject here was neither
relevant nor even accurate for these folks.
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From: ark at alice.uucp
Subject: Re: \"Infinite\" precision
Date: 19 Feb 87 04:59:53 GMT
To:       unix-wizards at brl-sem.arpa

In article <4521 at brl-adm.ARPA>, TVR%CCRMA-F4 at SAIL.Stanford.EDU writes:
>     In Algol 68 there is a provision for infinite precision arithmetic
>     (theoretically anyway--I don't know if anyone ever implemented such
>     a compiler).  Each time one prepends the word "long" to a variable
>     declaration, the compiler doubles the number of bits reserved.  (Or 
>     perhaps adds a constant factor--I forget.)

Nope.  Each length is required to be no shorter than the previous one,
but the implementation is allowed to stop lengthening at some point.
That point is defined by a built-in variable called intlengths.
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Date: 18 Feb 87  0118 PST
From: Tovar <TVR%CCRMA-F4 at SAIL.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Re: "Infinite" precision
To:   UNIX-Wizards at BRL.ARPA
Message-ID:  <8702180419.aa10112 at SPARK.BRL.ARPA>

>>  In Algol 68 there is a provision for infinite precision arithmetic
>>  (theoretically anyway--I don't know if anyone ever implemented such
    a compiler).  Each time one prepends the word "long" to a variable
    declaration, the compiler doubles the number of bits reserved.  (Or 
    perhaps adds a constant factor--I forget.)

"Infinite" precision arithmetic has existed for years in many (if not most)
LISP compilers and has proven to be quite valuable in both abstract and
applied mathematics.  Some implementations are so transparent that an
infinite loop involving a multiply in what you thought were ordinary
integers is sometimes detected by slowly exhausting address space...