Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper

But for now this is sufficient—as long as the test hierarchies aren't too deep, it should be fine. And if it becomes a problem, all you'll have to do is change the definition of deftest. 107 Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 103. Emphasis in original. 108 Mattel's Teen Talk Barbie 109 Obviously, the size of a number that can be represented on a computer with finite memory is still limited in practice; furthermore, the actual representation of bignums used in a particular Common Lisp implementation may place other limits on the size of number that can be represented. But these limits are going to be well beyond "astronomically" large numbers. For instance, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be less than 2^269; current Common Lisp implementations can easily handle numbers up to and beyond 2^262144. 110 Folks interested in using Common Lisp for intensive numeric computation should note that a naive comparison of the performance of numeric code in Common Lisp and languages such as C or FORTRAN will probably show Common Lisp to be much slower ...»