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Postings from January 2001
On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, John Peacock wrote: > Jarkko, Peter, et al - > > This whole discussion begs the question that perhaps BigInt.pm needs > a complete overhaul, preferentially as a thin layer over a fast integer > math lib (when possible). I am an interested party in this (since I > have two modules that depend on Math::BigFloat heavily) and am already > involved in an existing offline discussion with two different people > about just such an overhaul. > > Before we start messing with Configure options and such, could I suggest > that we apply the patch to 5.6.1 (since it is clearly a problem on the > described systems), and work on getting a better BigInt into 5.7.x. > > John Peacock Thinking back on similar issues it occurs to me that someone prefers bugs be exposed as bugs. In other words switching C<* 1e-5> to c</ 1e5> is simply glossing over a fundamental problem in the C run time that perl does not have an adequate fix for. Patching the bigint libs is avoiding the problem by brushing it under the rug. What happens to the poor mainframe perl scripter that inadvertently writes C<$foo = $bar * 1e-5;> ? Having the test fail with a note/patch in the respective README's may help customers put pressure on IBM and Siemens to fix the problem(s) and wouldn't interfere with any ongoing overhaul of the libs would it? Peter PrymmerThread Previous