bug#32252: [PATCH] %o and %x now format signed numbers

[Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 26 2018, Paul Eggert wrote:

> On 07/26/2018 10:16 AM, Helmut Eller wrote:
>> Where is that code?
>
> One example is url-digest-auth-make-cnonce. This was the first I ran
> into. No doubt there are others.

And how would url-digest-auth-make-cnonce look with bignums?

>> And why would it be difficult to teach
>> format-time-string to deal with the tricky bits that current-time
>> returns.
>
> ?! format-time-string already does that. And it's a hassle. Other
> Emacs Lisp code inspects timestamps directly too. And it's a hassle
> for that code too. Bignums would significantly lessen this
> hassle. Surely this is obvious.

To me it's not so obvious.  E.g. current-time is supposed to "return the
current time, as the number of seconds since [epoch]".  So, how are you
going to represent micro-seconds with bignums?

Or, e.g. disassemble_lisp_time deals with formats that are the form
(HIGH LOW USEC PSEC) or formats that were used in previous Emacs
versions.  With bignums, disassemble_lisp_time has to support the old
formats and bignums too.

Helmut