TITLE

Integrate BigInts (and BigRats) Support Tightly With The Basic Scalars

VERSION

  Maintainer: Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>
  Date: 5 Aug 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-internals@perl.org
  Number: 43
  Version: 1
  Status: Developing

ABSTRACT

Currently Perl 'transparently' starts using double floating point numbers when the numeric values grow too large for the native integer types (int, long, quad) can no more hold quantities that large. Because double floats are at their heart a lie, they cannot truly represent large numbers accurately. Therefore sometimes when the application would prefer to stay accurate, the use of 'bigints' (and for division, 'bigrats') would be preferable. Classes of applications that would prefer keeping true: cryptography, financial, statistics (combinatorics).

DESCRIPTION

When the following pragma is in effect all numeric SVs (or, rather, the numeric ops) would try to keep their results as big integers. "Try to" because some math simply doesn't play along: sin(), ln(), etc.

	use bigint;
	
	my $thats_big_baby = 5**5**5;

With only "use bigint" in scope 2/3 would fall back to .6666...7, but with the following pragma, it would be truly 2/3:

	use bigrat;

If one wants to limit the bigintism or -ratism to just a few select scalars, one could use 'strong typing':

	my bigint $i;
	my bigrat $r;

IMPLEMENTATION

Either include (if there is a bigint library with the appropriate features and licensing) a bigint library or implement one.

For performance reasons the bigint library needs to operate using the native integer types. We don't want 1+1 engaging the whole bigint machinery.

REFERENCES