davy (12/18/82)
#N:pur-ee:6400001:000:854 pur-ee!davy Dec 17 11:01:00 1982 This is probably a dumb question, but I'm just now trying to learn lisp. I was playing with the "fact" command a while back, and discovered that you can do fun things like take the factorial of 500, 1000, or even 10000 (if you don't mind a number that's 76 BLOCKS long!). Anyway, my question is this: How does lisp (we run Franz) do this? Those numbers are obviously slightly higher than a VAX can count, even using unsigned integers. Does it play with characters, or use an approximation, or what? Also, if someone could send me a brief description of just what a "Lisp Machine" is, I'd sure appreciate it. Since I'm sure no one really cares about the answers to these two questions, please MAIL your answers to: decvax!pur-ee!davy ucbvax!pur-ee!davy ihnss!pur-ee!davy harpo!pur-ee!davy --Dave Curry pur-ee!davy