Re: Making 'eq' == 'eql' in bignum branch

[Paul Eggert]

Andy Moreton wrote:

> There will always be a performance diffrence between fixnum and bignum
> values, and it may be useful for performance tuning to have a simple way
> to discover where that boundary lies.

Performance nerds can use 'most-positive-fixnum' and 'most-negative-fixnum' for 
that sort of thing. These constants have been there for some time and are not 
going away. My objection is to 'bignump' and 'fixnump', which are no more 
necessary as primitives than 'negativep' would be.

> These are used in the tests to ensure that implementation is correct,
> and that values in fixnum range are always represented as fixnums, not
> bignums. How do you propose to test that without these predicates ?

Tests can use 'most-positive-fixnum' and 'most-negative-fixnum', constants that 
tests need to use anyway in order to generate values like (1+ 
most-positive-fixnum). So they can survive quite well without 'bignump' and 
'fixnump' as primitives.