El Camino Bignum
El Camino Bignum
(humour)The Spanish word "real" (which has two syllables: /ray-al'/)means "royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". In theFortran language, a "real" quantity is a number typicallyprecise to seven significant digits, and a "double precision" quantity is a larger floating-point number,precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (otherlanguages have similar "real" types).
When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, heremarked 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 ofmiles long, he renamed it "El Camino Bignum", and that namehas stuck. (See bignum).