Re: #o and unsignedness

[Guy.Steele at CMU-10A]

The truncation I referred to was chopping off the poor "integer"
and forcing it to fit into a fixnum (thereby causing some bits
possibly to be lost, but in any case suddenly altering the
weight of one of its bits, from 2^25 to -2^35!!!).

There is a problem with #*O..., which is that if #B means binary
then #*B is ambiguous on a machine where just plain #* means
hexadecimal.

Letting #* vary in radix from machine to machine isn't all that
much of a problem -- the machines may have different word
lengths as well, after all.

Indeed, there is a nice symmetry between *, +, and - -- that's
why I originally proposed to use *nnnn* (the stars actually
being independent -- the treailing star was the "machine-radix point",
and the leading one meant "unsigned fixnum" -- so that -nnn*
and *ddd. actually made sense.  But reason prevailed, and we
got #*, which actually is rather nice to me now.)