New subject: 28 bit ought to be enough for anyone.

Sunday, 23 August 1998

        ...
>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic
<hniksic(a)srce.hr&gt; 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
Hrvoje> DEFINE_LRECORD_IMPLEMENTATION?  It allows you to specify a
Hrvoje> 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. 
Hrvoje> I still don't understand the problem.  Even if it is true that the
Hrvoje> size of the resulting number is unknown (and I am not convinced in
Hrvoje> this!),

Huh?  Subtract two very large numbers from each other.  The only way I
see of finding out how big the result is is to perform the
subtraction.

Hrvoje> you are still quite free to use realloc() and friends to
Hrvoje> adjust the size incrementally.

Not if the bignum is supposed to live in the Emacs Lisp heap.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Chipsy
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla

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Re: 28 bit ought to be enough for anyone.