Note that besides Daryle's new effort, which I haven't looked at, there's Boost BigInt by Ron Garcia and friends in the sandbox as well. Not sure why we keep reinventing this but never finishing...
As, I suspect, a representative of those who don't fully understand the
very strange I find it that Boost has several flavours of fancy points but lacks any sort of bigger integer.
Surely, bigger integers are quite fundamental; and have many potential applications.
I ask again if our review process is partly to blame for this.
IMO people are not going to put in the boring work on finishing it to the rightly rigorous review standard unless they feel they have a good chance of getting it through (and maybe not even then - but would be happy for someone else to do the drudge work on testing and documentation). Do we need some process for deciding that a
"Paul A Bristow" wrote in message details of these discussions, I feel impelled to say how particular design/prototype is a 'candidate for work towards
a full review' in order to provide that encouragement?
Paul
In my opinion software design is not mathematical proof that one design is better than another, but there is the mathematical fact that the set of unsigned integers is a subset of the integers, and the set of modular integers is a subset of the integers. In the book "C++ Coding Standards" by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu, in chapter 64: "Blending static and dynamic polymorphism judiciously", it reads: "Due to its characteristics, dynamic polymorphism in C++ is best at: - Uniform manipulation based on superset/subset relationships: Different classes that hold a superset/subset (base/derived) relationship can be treated uniformly." In my "design decisions" I will quote this passage literally. Of course anyone is free to propose a different design, and then the LWG would have to make a decision which design to prefer. Regards, Maarten