>>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)srce.hr> writes:
Hrvoje> sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes:
>> a) Add them as another datatype comletely separate from Elisp fixnums,
>> with explicit coercions back and forth.
>>
>> This, I believe, is possible with minimal changes to the Elisp
>> machine, even though it's still a sufficiently hairy job, 'cause
>> you need to interface with the garbage collector in a suitable
>> way.
Hrvoje> Not hairy at all. Have you looked at DEFINE_LRECORD_IMPLEMENTATION?
Hrvoje> It allows you to specify a callback routine for the GC.
I wasn't thinking about tracing, but rather about the fact that
(according to my totally naive view of how efficient bignum arithmetic
works), with some bignum operations, it may not be possible to know
the size of the result without actually computing it. For example,
can you shrink an object after creating it?
--
Cheers =8-} Chipsy
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla