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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.raspberry-pi
Subject: Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2024 04:01:49 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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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.