[m-dev.] Re: for review: big ints

[Fergus Henderson]

On 04-Apr-1998, Bert Thompson <aet at hydra.cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:
> Thomas Charles CONWAY <conway at cs.mu.OZ.AU> writes:
> 
> |I wrote an equivalent module quite some time ago, but I never
> |included it because multiplication was O(N^2) (as yours is).
> |For it to be useful, it really needs the O(NlogN) version which
> |is considerably harder to implement.
> 
> I disagree.

Yes, I'm with Bert here -- there will be many applications which could
make use of arbitrary precision integers but which don't care about
the performance of multiplication on large numbers, so I think it
is useful as is.

I think the lack of binary operations (and, or, xor, not) may be more
significant for many applications, but again, they might make it *more*
useful, but it is already useful as is.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.