Alex Wood

That would certainly be helpful for debugging this problem, though it isn't the problem itself. Unfortunately while I'd _love_ to put in even something on the level of "error printing...

Possibly related to #961. Relatedly, could you try the example in that issue? ```lisp (handler-bind ((arithmetic-error #'abort)) (restart-case (integer-decode-float #.ext:short-float-positive-infinity) (abort ()))) ```

That's weird. Maybe FreeBSD has different signal behavior somehow.

That is of course worse... I don't have a FreeBSD system to test on and I'm still mystified by the other problems we've had in #961

Currently character strings (as opposed to base strings) are UTF-32. It looks like we have UTF-8 and UCS-4 (which is the same as UTF-32, I think) as external formats. We...

> I see. So they can't use something more like an iterator? The language mandates that they go index by index, and that implementation detail can't be hidden? In the...

@selwynsimsek is working on bignum stuff right now, but I thought I'd take a glance at this, and I don't actually see how to do it in any direct fashion....

though if we had access to the array of limbs directly, like selwyn was doing, we could just grab whatever limbs are covered by the position, i suppose. might save...

Now that I have rewritten bignums this does seem more possible, as we can access the bignum "digits" directly. We can reduce or eliminate consing in some cases, though I...

Mostly resolved by #1420, but I'm going to leave this open to remind me to mention it in the manual.