bignums in a reflective system

[Fare Rideau]

>>: Henry G. Baker
>: Kalman Reti

>>: I agree that complex numbers should _not_ be part of 'basic'/primitive
>>: Lisp, but it should be possible to program them as a library package
>>: on top.  Ditto for bignums.

> You might want to reconsider on bignums.
> A single large file on a big disk these
> days overflows 32 bits in byte length.
>
So what?
I hope your don't mean that Get-file-length should be basic/primitive???
In the reflective system we want, it won't be,
so there's no problem with having it return a non-primitive type like bignums
(or long long ints, for that matter).

The trap: basic != standard.
There can very well be a non-so-standard basic system
used to build standard non-basic system on top...

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