So, everyone's familiar with the shell ignoreeof setting, right?
You aren't....? Philistines. OK, for the non-geeks among us, the ignoreeof setting in a Unix shell tells the shell how many successive Ctrl-D (EOF, End Of File) characters it should ignore before exiting.
Given that the Very Large Number 10100 (that's a 1 followed by 100 zeros) has been officially named the googol, it occurred to me that there should be an official name for 21024, which is appriximately 1.7 x 10318. Since BIGNUM is already a known term in computer circles, the first (only partially serious) idea that popped into my mind was that 21024 should be known as TWOBIGNUM. It has also been suggested that, inasmuch as the values 210, 220 and 230 have been declared by fiat by the IEC to have the corresponding prefixes kibi-, mebi- and gibi-[1] instead of the accepted computer science usage of kilo-, mega-, giga-, 21024 should by analogy be referred to as a goobol (making 2goobol a goobolplex). There's a minor issue of some 218 decimal orders of magnitude involved, but what the heck, what's 10218 between friends? 2256 is too small (about 1080), and 2512 is already too big (about 10160), so why not go the whole 21024?
So what say you? Shall 21024 be TWOBIGNUM, or a goobol, or both, or something else entirely? Offer up your best suggestions.
[1] I found a reference saying that these prefixes are actually derived from contractions of kilobinary, megabinary, gigabinary, terabinary, petabinary, exabinary etc, which on the face of it actually makes a lot of sense. But they still sound bloody silly, if you ask me. (Which, technically, you didn't. But they do anyway. So there.)
