El Camino Bignum

humour /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 "doubleprecision" 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)