Re: Bignum support
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
>>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic
<hniksic(a)arsdigita.com> writes:
Hrvoje> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
>> I don't think he'd necessarily want to _disallow_ [bignums].
Hrvoje> Internally, why not? The user will never see the
Hrvoje> difference, and it allows us to retain the simple XINT
Hrvoje> interface whenever we're dealing with fixnums.
Because it might be more efficient to do an entire calculation in
bignum (see below), then canonicalize at the end, rather than do
canonicalizations at every point.
Quite possible. The only important thing is for the "uncanonicalized"
bignum not to escape into the Lisp world.
Hrvoje> I assume the status of "experimentalness"
can be revised
Hrvoje> if the code proves to be stable and reliable?
If you mean change the name to "optional feature" or something like
that, sure. If you mean change the default in configure after feature
freeze, no.
Who mentioned "after feature freeze"? Are you proclaiming the feature
freeze tomorrow or something?
We're seeing a lot of efficiency complaints about 21.4.
Can you provide some pointers?