Re: standard representations

[Nick Ing-Simmons]

Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>Anyone know of a good bigint/bigfloat library whose terms are such that we 
>can just snag the source and use it in perl?

There was some traffic on gcc list recently about a GNU one (presumably GPL
only).

>I don't really care to write 
>the code for division, 

As I recall Knuth has something on it.
I know that some hardware FPUs do division (N/M) by 
Newton-Raphson expansion of 1/M and then do N*(1/M).

>let alone the transcendental math ops...

TI's sources for those site some book or other.
The snag with those and sqrt() etc. is that the published algorithms
"know" how many terms of power series are needed to reach (say) IEEE-754
"double". 

Thus a "big float" still needs to decide how precise it is going to 
be or atan2(1,1)*4 (aka PI) is going to take a while to compute...


-- 
Nick Ing-Simmons