John Maddock wrote:
A big int should be too hard, an arbitary precision floating point arithmetc type would be very welcome too. That's harder as it needs std lib support to be useful (exp, pow, log trig functions etc), so it's rather more work, but then again the student has all summer right ? :-)
IMO a big int would be the most welcome as it would provide the _base_ for an arbitrary-length floating point type.
Very fabuluous indeed, but have you read the spec? It make me quiver just to think about it! Maybe as in all things familiarity would simplify things somewhat.
I don't think so. Integer arithmetics is a well-described field and there is a lot of good material about it, all well listed under http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal. It's not necessary to provide a full-optimized implementation with fourier transformations for multiplication etc. - this can be added later as well. A type that does the basic operations and maybe some of exp/pow/log would be very helpful, too, to start with! I'm rather afraid that the design of such a type could become quite complex, as you have to provide a good separation of interface and actual calculation: this is the only possibility to use the same one later for n1977 as well - but this is also a great chance! Stefan