Re: modular arith.

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

Certainly having a fixed modulus imposed by the hardware is pretty
poor. If the modulus is not a prime it doesn't even help much
with the "/" problem. So, what one would want is a Type of
number, which was modulo P. You can do a lot of calculations
with those numbers, and for small modulus they needn't even
be consed. I would even go so far as to suggest the obvious,
encoding the characteristic of the field with the fixnum.
It wouldn't take much space, could be made to cost only a bit
for everyday fixnums (characteristic 0), and would be quite
nice for doing algebra of all kinds. 

-gjc