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28 lines
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>El Camino Bignum</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../E.html" title="E"/><link rel="previous" href="eighty-column-mind.html" title="eighty-column mind"/><link rel="next" href="elder-days.html" title="elder days"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">El Camino Bignum</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="eighty-column-mind.html">Prev</a><EFBFBD></td><th width="60%" align="center">E</th><td width="20%" align="right"><EFBFBD><a accesskey="n" href="elder-days.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="El-Camino-Bignum"/><dt xmlns="" id="El-Camino-Bignum"><b>El Camino Bignum</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/el<65> k@<40>mee<65>noh big<69>nuhm/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San
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Francisco peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to Mexico
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City; many portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on the
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San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which
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defines <a href="../L/logical.html"><i class="glossterm">logical</i></a> north and south even though it isn't
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really north-south in many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford
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University and so is familiar to hackers.</p><p>The Spanish word ‘real’ (which has two syllables:
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<span class="pronunciation">/ray<61>ahl<68>/</span>) means
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‘royal’; El Camino Real is ‘the royal road’. In
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the FORTRAN language, a <span class="firstterm">real</span> quantity
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is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a <span class="firstterm">double precision</span> quantity is a larger
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floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits
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(other languages have similar <span class="firstterm">real</span>
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types).</p><p>When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a
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long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on ‘real’, he
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started calling it ‘El Camino Double Precision’ — but
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when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he
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renamed it ‘El Camino Bignum’, and that name has stuck. (See
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<a href="../B/bignum.html"><i class="glossterm">bignum</i></a>.)</p><p>[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in
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fact himself —ESR]</p><p>In the early 1990s, the synonym <span class="firstterm">El Camino
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Virtual</span> was been reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl
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sites in the Valley.</p><p>Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard
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to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as
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“<span class="quote">El Camino Imaginary</span>”. One popular theory is that the
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intersection is located near Moffett Field — where they keep all
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those complex planes.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="eighty-column-mind.html">Prev</a><EFBFBD></td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../E.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"><EFBFBD><a accesskey="n" href="elder-days.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">eighty-column mind<6E></td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"><EFBFBD>elder days</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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