6.1 Introduction

This chapter describes the Functional Developer implementation of machine words. It describes a number of extensions to the Dylan language, which are available from the Dylan library.

Throughout this chapter, arguments are instances of the class specified by the argument name, unless otherwise noted. Thus, the arguments machine-word and integer are instances of <machine-word> and <integer>, respectively.

The class <machine-word> is a sealed subclass of <object>, defined in the Dylan library. The class <machine-word> represents a limited range of integral values. The representation used has the natural size suggested by the implementation architecture. (On the PC, a <machine-word> is 32 bits wide.) The class <machine-word> is disjoint from all other classes specified by the Dylan language.

The \== function compares instances of <machine-word> by value.

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Common Dylan and Functional Extensions - 31 Mar 00