[TUHS] Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?

[Bakul Shah]

On Sep 11, 2022, at 6:30 AM, Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
> [Algol 68's presupposition is visible in declarations like "long long
> long ... int". An implementation need support only a limited number of
> "longs", but each supported variety must have a definite maximum
> value, which is returned by an "environment enquiry" function. For
> amusement, consider the natural idea of implementing the longest
> variety with bignums.]

It would be natural to use a Kleene star to represent an arbitrarily
long string of LONGs -- "long* int" -- though AFAIK Algol68 doesn't
do bignums. Weirdly even most 21st century progamming languages do
not provide built-in support for bignums!

C's INT_MAX, LONG_MAX etc are kind of an environment enquiry...