Re: bigger integers

[Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com>]

Joe Corneli wrote:
 >    After all, emacs lisp is designed to count characters in a file,
 >    not to compute factorials.
 >
 >  "Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time
 >  display editor."
 >
 > If I can't extend or customize it to compute 12! then there seems to
 > be something missing.  Kevin's factorial works though so I guess
 > that's good enough for me... oh wait a second now it stopped working.
 >
 >   Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth")

The obvious pseudo-fix is something like:

(setq max-lisp-eval-depth (* 42 max-lisp-eval-depth))

 >   (factorial (1- num))
 >   (* num (factorial (1- num)))
 >   (if (<= num 0) 1.0 (* num (factorial ...)))
 >   factorial(7)
 >   (* num (factorial (1- num)))
 >   (if (<= num 0) 1.0 (* num (factorial ...)))
 >   factorial(8)
 >   (* num (factorial (1- num)))
 >   (if (<= num 0) 1.0 (* num (factorial ...)))
 >   factorial(9)
 >   (* num (factorial (1- num)))
 >   (if (<= num 0) 1.0 (* num (factorial ...)))
 >   factorial(10)
 >   (* num (factorial (1- num)))
 >   (if (<= num 0) 1.0 (* num (factorial ...)))
 >   factorial(11)
 >   (* num (factorial (1- num)))
 >   (if (<= num 0) 1.0 (* num (factorial ...)))
 >   factorial(12)
 >   eval((factorial 12))
 >
 > (This same computation was fine just a minute ago, then I tried to
 > compute 100! and now it doesn't want to do 12! any more.)

That's weird, it sounds like the stack has been corrupted.

-- 
Kevin Rodgers