"Joe Gottman" <jgottman@carolina.rr.com> wrote in message news:e52u60$h8i$1@sea.gmane.org...
"Maarten Kronenburg" <M.Kronenburg@inter.nl.net> wrote in message news:e5254e$tba$1@sea.gmane.org...
In the boost vault http://boost-consulting.com/vault/ under Math - Numerics the document infintdraft.pdf contains the Proposal for an Infinite Precision Integer for Library Technical Report 2, Draft.
There's a few members that I'd really like to see.
First, an operator unspecified_bool_type(), like the one found in shared_ptr. There's a lot of code that looks like the following:
long x = doSomething(); if (x) { //whatever.
If integer is going to be a drop-in replacement for long then it should
have
this functionality.
Thanks for your comments. The integer is not a drop-in replacement for any base type; because it accesses its data through a pointer, and has to check on certain conditions and carries etc, it is much slower than the base types. A conversion operator will generate ambiguities in expressions, even a bool conversion operator, because bool can be implicitly converted to int. Therefore no conversion operators are provided. In this case one should use: if( !x.is_zero() ) or if( x.get_sign() )
Second, it would be very nice if we could have a two-parameter constructor for emulating scientific notation:
integer googol(1, 100);
This can be done by: integer googol = pow( 10, 100 );
I'm not sure how technically feasible this second one is, but it would certainly be useful.
Joe Gottman
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