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Re:Who's Using Ada? Real-World Projects Powered by the Ada P... by gamegoblin on Thursday December 11, 2014 @05:09PM (#8737324)
I was paraphrasing from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic#...

So in the 50s they had integers with up to 2^9 - 1 (== 511) decimal digits.

In the 60s, the transistor-based one could do integers as big as your memory, the largest memory offered gave you up to 60K digits.

Re:Who's Using Ada? Real-World Projects Powered by the Ada P... by ScottBurson on Thursday December 11, 2014 @05:53PM (#8737518)
Okay, very good. I stand corrected. (Well, mostly. I would pedantically argue that you may have arbitrary-precision arithmetic, but you don't have arbitrary-precision integers until they're a functional datatype, so you can write simply 'a + b' to add them -- with the automatic allocation that that in general requires. But this is a quibble.)