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Postings from March 2001
On 03/05/01 Dan Sugalski wrote: > =item Arbitrary precision integers > > Big integers, or bigints, are arbitrary-length integer numbers. The > only limit to the number of digits in a bigint is the lesser of the > amount of memory available or the maximum value that can be > represented by a C<UV>. This will generally allow at least 4 billion > digits, which ought to be far more than enough for anyone. During the RFC process there was a lot of talk about reducing the perl core and while there were different views on _what_ should be removed if at all, I don't think that including bigint and bigfloat was considered for that goal:-) The core needs to be aware of overflows and have hooks to plug an external bigint implementation when that happens, but should not demand a specific bigint implementation. I can't find the reference now, but it seams it will be required for the base integer type to know how to upgrade to a bigint. This is wrong: the interpreter should detect the overflow and call a bigint handler. The bigint type will know how to convert the integers to its internal format, no need to assume a specific format about that in the core. lupus -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- lupus@debian.org debian/rules lupus@ximian.com Monkeys do it betterThread Previous | Thread Next