On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 11:01, Brandon Kohn <blkohn@hotmail.com> wrote:
-------------------------------------------------- From: "Mathias Gaunard" <mathias.gaunard@ens-lyon.org> Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 5:50 PM To: <boost@lists.boost.org> Subject: Re: [boost] [mp_int] new release
Kevin Sopp wrote:
I made a new release of my multiprecision integer library
I personally find the words arbitrary precision or multiprecision ambiguous. I never know which one means that the numbers grow as needed and which ones means that it can work with any size, but fixed (which is useful to simulating hardware).
I have this same issue. From my tests I suspect his grows arbitrarily. I would propose a name change to reflect that. I'm sure this has been discussed before. big_int seems popular if a bit crude. Assuming it is arbitrary, arbitrary_precision_int? (perhaps convenience typedefs?) I tend to prefer descriptive names to abbreviations; though I concede I may be in the minority.
I'm not a fan of that one, since LLVM has an "APInt" class which represents a fixed, but arbitrary, precision integer. How about unbounded_int? It fits nicely with the is_bounded in numeric_limits. ~ Scott