Why are fixnums in Emacs only 29 bits?

Question

And why don\'t they change it?

Edit: The reason ask is because I\'m new to emacs and I would like to use Emacs as a \"programmer calculator\". So, I can manipulate

Answer 1

In many Lisp implementations, some of the bits in a word are used for a tag. This lets things like the garbage collector know what is a pointer and what isn't without having to guess.

Why do you care how big an Elisp fixnum is? You can open gigantic files as it is.