>>>>> "Robert" == Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com> writes:
Robert> On 2/13/07, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>> So you can concoct examples where you bump up against some limits somewhere.
>> It is much preferable to say something like "do you really want to do that?"
>> than to silently go off for an hour or a day or ... or run out of stack or
>> memory or electricity. Removing limits is not always a good idea if the
>> next step leads to an intolerable situation.
Robert> I simply can't see any point to imposing a limits of this kind.
Robert> It's trivial to make up examples of computations which will be
Robert> too big in one way or another. How about 3!!! ? Is that too big?
FWIW, I know cmucl and most likely sbcl has a limit on the size of the
integer exponent for (expt m n), if m is an integer. I have run into
it a few times, but not often. A few times it saved me from crashing
my Lisp with a heap overflow. Other times, it was just a major
annoyance because the the limit was just below what I needed to do.
But the limit can be changed.
Ray