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Friday, May 17, 2024 |
Geeky Groaner   
Date: Sent Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Category: None | Rating: 1.54/5 (511 votes)
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El Camino Bignum /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n.
The road mundanely called El Camino Real runs 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 recent years, the synonym "El Camino Virtual" has 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.
Received from James Polley.
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