Before I start scaring you off: Would it be difficult to have a separate "unsigned integer type?". That could still go up to 2^30-1. Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)srce.hr&gt; writes: No released XEmacs has that functionality remember? Note that currently you cripple anyway your XEmacs when you switch it on, you get an enormous memory overhead on all lisp types. I wouldn't loose any sleep over 1-bit of integer precision (unless we were going from 32 to 31). We have two competing primitive types. One of them is more or less naturally limited to 31-bits and for the other the cut-off is arbitrary. We have only one with 31-bits available, you choose? No, the answer would be "use a 64-bit system everyone sensible does that". I think the number of cases where you want to edit a 0.75 G file in XEmacs is extremely low, certainly much lower than the # of people profiting from full UCS-4 transparency (probably also not a big group). Because I think editing a 1 Gbyte buffer in a Mule XEmacs will be so slow that it doesn't matter much anyway. Jan