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

I use the Common Lisp interpreter CLISP as a programmer's calculator. Common Lisp has the sanest number handling that I've seen in any programming language; most notably, it has integers of arbitrary size, i.e. bignums, as well as rational numbers. It also has input in arbitrary number bases and bitwise functions for bignums. If you want to calculate from within Emacs, you can run CLISP in an M-x shell. As a bonus, the syntax is almost exactly the same as what you would use in Emacs Lisp.