From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!sn-xit-02!supernews.com!isdnet!newshunter!cosy.sbg.ac.at!newsfeed.Austria.EU.net!newsfeed.kpnqwest.at!nslave.kpnqwest.net!nloc3.kpnqwest.net!nloc.kpnqwest.net!nmaster.kpnqwest.net!nreader3.kpnqwest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Big Numbers References: Mail-Copies-To: never From: Erik Naggum Message-ID: <3212348552357456@naggum.net> Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 17 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 23:02:34 GMT X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@Norway.EU.net X-Trace: nreader3.kpnqwest.net 1003359754 193.71.66.49 (Thu, 18 Oct 2001 01:02:34 MET DST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 01:02:34 MET DST Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:18057 * Barry Margolin | There are bignum libraries available for most programming languages. If | I had an application written in language X and I needed to add the | ability to check for Mersenne primes to it, I would simply link in that | library rather than rewrite the whole thing in Lisp just because it has | built-in bignum support. CLISP's bignum library was recently made available as C/C++ classes. I have not looked at it, but there is no way to make the regular integers in C/C++ overflow properly and spontaneously create a new type, so you would have to make _some_ changes to your source code to use bignums, not to mention what you have to do when bignums are to be used in a call to some other function that expects a regular integer. Several _disjoint_ integer types is not a huge win as far as language features go. /// --