On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 12:30, Paul A Bristow <pbristow@hetp.u-net.com> wrote:
So are you proposing two names:
bounded_int - arbitrary but fixed (maximum?) size integer
unbounded_int - grows to accommodate a size (bounded only by machine memory).
I'm just proposing the latter name, as the documentation specifies that the integers "grow dynamically as needed". I would be interested in a general facility for arbitrary-sized integers (so I could add 2 64-bit numbers on any architecture as bounded_int<65>s, for example, with no possibility of overflow), but that's out of scope for this proposal. (It would be nice if it could be done just with a different allocator, but I don't think that's feasible, currently.)
As an aside, does this scale to floating-point?
If we were to produce a Boost equivalent to NTL quad_float bounded_float and RR - arbitrary but fixed (default 50 decimal digits) and an unbounded Exact real,
for example to
unbounded_float (or unbounded_real)
similar to exact real - but then exact_real would be more obvious?
I dislike exact_real, since there are obviously an infinite number of reals that cannot be held exactly.
and bounded_float or bounded_real
But then one wants to encode the real precision? float, double, quad_float, octo_float...
I presume the bits of mantissa and exponent would be template parameters.