Nick writes:
> 2 * 3 give a bignum. That feels evil.
> Except that the way that $a = 2 * 3 will work is that the assignment of
> the bignum temporary to $a will cause $a to drop it back to an int
> (for most languages' choice of target PMC) ?
Dan, any feeling about RISC vs. CISC? Because to me, this seems
like a good place to punt, and provide two, maybe three mults:
multbig: returns bignum, relies on PMC smart autounboxing
multint: returns int-or-die, no unboxing
multsmallest: returns parrot-defined 'smallest type that fits',
balancing speed vs. compiler/interpreter autoboxing/
autounboxing hinting
Most people in Perl would be happy with multbig, because frankly
they don't care that their math takes .1 ms rather than .0001 ms
(or whatever). But the set of people that really would rather
have superfast math could drop over to multint. And, a notional
Perl6 optimizing compiler could use multsmallest when it detects
the conditions are right.
Another concern besides speed might be sizeof(PMC) for each of
the options...some of the genome/nasa guys could get kinda
twitchy if bignum is 1k per, etc., etc.
F.
