Re: Another thought on #o

[Guy.Steele at CMU-10A]

You said,
    "Under my proposal, the only truncation is that if you want
to type in a 32-bit number, you type in 32 bits."

How, pray tell, does one type precisely 32 bits in octal?
(Okay, so the VAX uses hex, but...)

But if you type in a 36-bit number (on the PDP-10), you said
that you wanted to get a fixnum, not a bignum.  In order to
do this, you have to *know* that 36 bits is what you wanted.
By "truncation", I don't mean that any bits you typed are lost;
instead I mean that an arbitrary word length is somehow chosen,
which can cause odd things such as negative numbers to appear
if a large "unsigned" number is typed.

By the way, on the VAX should an unsigned number be 28 bits or 32 bits?
(Sorry, I meant 30 or 32.)  In the one case you can't specify a full word
unsignedly; in the other you get a bignum.