follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting
with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the
country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking Team had decided to do
it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was
established. Most gateway sites have {ad-hockery} in their
mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular,
the address me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as could be interpreted in
JANET's big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the
standard little-endian way as one in the domain as (American
Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.

:bignum: /big'nuhm/ /n./ [orig. from MIT MacLISP]
1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for
very large integers. 2. More generally, any very large number.
"Have you ever looked at the United States Budget? There's
bignums for you!" 3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on
the dice especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare
{moby}, sense 4). See also {El Camino Bignum}.

Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages
provide a kind of data called `integer', but such computer
integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be
smaller than than 2^(31) (2,147,483,648) or (on a
{bitty box}) 2^(15) (32,768). If you want to work
with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point
numbers, which are usually accurate to only six or seven decimal
places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact
calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial
of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2
times 1). For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the