Re: Pushing the `gnus-range-*' functions down into the C layer

[Wojciech Meyer <wojciech.meyer@googlemail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
> Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On 2010-09-10 15:01 +0100, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:
>>> Yeah. Bignum support in Emacs would totally rock. No more manual
>>> conversions to floating point numbers to do safe-ish computations on
>>> numbers that might be too big would be needed.
>>>
>>> But I suspect that it's a kinda big project.  :-)
>>
>> GNU already has http://gmplib.org/. Would love to see it linked in too ;)
>
> Let me just quote a random line from the Emacs sources:
>
>  int nbytes = XINT (length);
>
> And then think about what you'd have to do to make Emacs support random
> precision arithmetic.  It makes me swoon just to contemplate.  :-)

You have a type system. You don't need to make functions to accept bignums as
a replacement for ints. They have quite limited usage, mostly for numerical
computations. I tend to agree it would be nice to have them though.


>
> --
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
>
>
>