Anyone else feel that there might be a better name out there for this facility than "Infinite Precision Integer"? Taking the first sentence of the draft:
The infinite precision integer is an integer that is not limited in range by the computer word length. I'm certainly no expert on math terminology, so someone please help me out if I'm confused here, but aren't "precision" and "range" quite distinct concepts?
It seems like "precision" isn't really what distinguishes this facility from that of the built-in integral types. E.g,. in what way can't the built-in int already represent its values with "infinite precision"? Ref: http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG11/docs/iso11404.pdf "ISO/IEC 11404:1996 Language Independent Datatypes (LID)" Defines 'Integer' as "the mathematical datatype comprising the exact integral values" with the properties of "exact" and "unbounded". Also, I'd stay away from the term infinite, especially when it's clearly constrained by something as finite as computer memory. Terms for "the infinities" are already defined by IEEE-754 have a meaning different from what seems to be intended here. Perhaps a better name for this facility might be "Unbounded Integer" or "Unrestricted Range Integer". (De-ranged Integer anyone?) In keeping with the C/C++ traditions of referring to the representational size (short, int, long, long long, etc.), another approach to might refer to them as "Unsized" integers. I can see why other libraries are called simply "bignum", "gmp", etc.. - Marsh