AMDG On 03/15/2011 06:48 AM, Domagoj Saric wrote:
"Steven Watanabe" <watanabesj@gmail.com> wrote in message news:4D7E2D5D.5050304@providere-consulting.com...
I don't think fixed size integers are necessary for a Boost bigint proposal to begin with.
Why?
A Boost library does not need to be all things to all people. It does need to have a clearly defined scope, and it does need to do it well. I would not generally vote against a library because it is missing feature X, even if X is something that I actually need.
First, AFAIK a significant portion of 'bigint' usage falls into the realm of cryptography and encryption keys which usually have fixed power-of-two sizes and both 'fixed' and 'power-of-two' almost always translate to great simplification/efficiency improvements when one gets to the implementation level. This naturally translates to the question "why should I pay for usage of new, try, catch and throw if all I want is to construct a statically known fixed-size public RSA key and use it to verify a message"?
And of course these things are so much more expensive than the modular exponentiation required by RSA...
Second, AFAICT they are trivial to implement (with the right internal design of course, which was demanded of XInt long time ago but it never happened).
In Christ, Steven Watanabe