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I wanted the hexadecimal string for a large integer such as below:

(format "%x" 2738188573457603759)

This returns 2600000000f95c00 which is incorrect, it should be 2600000000f95caf.

The value of most-positive-fixnum on my box is 0x1fffffffffffffff which is less than the number I'm supplying above.

As a user I'm a bit baffled what is happening. The manual indicates integers larger than this range are converted to a floating-point number which is a concern for precision but I suspect this is what is biting me here?

I should have known there was an issue with this number since normally I evaluate them directly using eval-last-sexp and it didn't show the octal/hex variants.. :)

I wonder why Emacs Lisp doesn't support bignums, so precision would not be an issue?

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  • 0x1fffffffffffffff is less than 0x2600000000f95caf, which would explain why you're getting these problems. – DoMiNeLa10 Feb 9 '18 at 7:55
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    Wrt your last question: I've been asking for bignum support for a long time. The place to ask that is emacs-devel@gnu.org. The place to request it is either on that same list or via M-x report-emacs-bug (that's for enhancements too, not just bug reports). – Drew Feb 9 '18 at 16:27
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You've answered your own question -- you're dealing with a number which is larger than most-positive-fixnum and are encountering floating point precision errors.

The usual solution in Emacs is to use M-x calc. Type d 6 in the calc buffer to run calc-hex-radix (or d r to enter any supported radix value), and then all numbers will be displayed in hex.

In this case, you can enter 2738188573457603759 and it will be displayed as 16#2600000000F95CAF

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