APPROVE COMMIT 21.5 On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 7:54 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: Yes, I was recycling some old text here. On second thought, I agree with you. If you want ratios, use one of the 3rd party libraries. I have removed this text. It does. It's very slow, ,though. I'm not sure it is. The BSDs all have BSD MP. Pretty much every Linux distribution has GMP, and many have MPIR. GMP and MPIR are both available on Windows, as well as several commercial Unices. I'm not sure who we would be targeting with other numeric libraries. Performance hasn't really been an issue in the past. It might become more of an issue if some applications pop up that use bignums, ratios, or bigfloats heavily. So far I have not seen any such applications, though. If the compiler can tell that the parameter is always in the fixnum range, then a decent C optimizer should compile the two forms down to the same code. If the compiler can't tell, but the human programmer can, then it is an optimization. I think of it as more signaling my intentions to other programmers: "I intend this to be used for fixnum computations only." I have added some text to clarify this point. Done. I don't have a preference. I have seen MPIR programmers claim that MPIR is faster and uses less memory than GMP, but I have no data either way. I suspect that a typical XEmacs load won't stress either library, so the difference is probably nothing to write home about. For that reason, I decline to give a preference at this time. I am attaching the revised patch which I will commit shortly. -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/ _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Patches mailing list XEmacs-Patches(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-patches