On 03/05/01 Dan Sugalski wrote:
> =item Arbitrary precision integers
>
> Big integers, or bigints, are arbitrary-length integer numbers. The
> only limit to the number of digits in a bigint is the lesser of the
> amount of memory available or the maximum value that can be
> represented by a C<UV>. This will generally allow at least 4 billion
> digits, which ought to be far more than enough for anyone.
During the RFC process there was a lot of talk about reducing
the perl core and while there were different views on _what_
should be removed if at all, I don't think that including bigint
and bigfloat was considered for that goal:-)
The core needs to be aware of overflows and have hooks to plug
an external bigint implementation when that happens, but should not
demand a specific bigint implementation.
I can't find the reference now, but it seams it will be required
for the base integer type to know how to upgrade to a bigint.
This is wrong: the interpreter should detect the overflow and
call a bigint handler. The bigint type will know how to convert
the integers to its internal format, no need to assume a specific
format about that in the core.
lupus
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