bignum support + calc + GNU Emacs

["Jose E. Marchesi" <jemarch@gnu.org>]

Hi all.

I am in the process of writing uuid.el, a implementation of the ITU
X.667 standard for the generation of Universal Unique Identifiers. I
need that support for the AddressBook[1].

In order to generate the uuids the program should manipulate 60-bit
unsigned integers. The question is, for a program/library supposed to
work in GNU Emacs, would it be considered good practice to use
(require) calc's lisp implementation of bignums, considering uuid.el
is intended to be a quite generic library?

On the other hand, i made a search in the emacs-devel archive for
discussion regarding bignum support, without results.

I think would be quite good to have some "standarized" way to use
bignum/bigfloats in Emacs. I like the calc way to manage the issue in
pure lisp, but to make the garbage collector to work with libgmp would
be great too (i think XEmacs already has support for libgmp).

Any though?


[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/AddressBook 

-- 
Jose E. Marchesi    <jemarch@gnu.org>
                    <jemarch@es.gnu.org>

GNU Project         http://www.gnu.org
GNU Spain           http://es.gnu.org