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el camino bignum
(foldoc) | El Camino Bignum
/el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ The road mundanely called
El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula
that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and
many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the
San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino
Real, which defines logical north and south even though it
isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs
right past Stanford University.
The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/)
means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In the
Fortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typically
precise to seven significant digits, and a "{double
precision}" quantity is a larger floating-point number,
precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other
languages have similar "real" types).
When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he
remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on
"real", he started calling it "El Camino Double Precision" -
but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of
miles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that name
has stuck. (See bignum).
[Jargon File]
(1996-07-16)
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el camino bignum
(jargon) | El Camino Bignum
/el' k@·mee´noh big´nuhm/, n.
The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San Francisco
peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to Mexico City; many
portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco
peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines {
logical} north and south even though it isn't really north-south in many
places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is
familiar to hackers.
The Spanish word ‘real’ (which has two syllables: /ray·ahl'/) means
‘royal’; El Camino Real is ‘the royal road’. In the FORTRAN language, a
real quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits,
and a double precision quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise
to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar real
types).
When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long
road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on ‘real’, he started calling it ‘El
Camino Double Precision’ — but when the hacker was told that the road was
hundreds of miles long, he renamed it ‘El Camino Bignum’, and that name has
stuck. (See bignum.)
[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in fact
himself —ESR]
In the early 1990s, the synonym El Camino Virtual was been reported as an
alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.
Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard to refer
to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as “El Camino
Imaginary”. One popular theory is that the intersection is located near
Moffett Field — where they keep all those complex planes.
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