Just a crazy idea ... what about if the exponent is a big integer as
well? And the mantissa ... guess you can go all crazy, hope this is supported by the library!
My main point against this idea would be that this might drop performance a lot.
I think, that with speicalization that should at least be possible have special, high performance implementations for e.g. int32 and int64 as exponent. With the type of the exponent as a template parameter that sould work well.
Christof
Well, I like it... And I don't like it---right now. The increased testing effort would throw this library back, maybe, almost a year (at least my float back-end part of it). I tested that back-end with automatically generated test cases from Mathematica in combination with state-of-the-art code coverage off and on for the better part of a year. Realistically, one would recommend keeping a flexible exponent on the *very interesting* list, yet moving on with the tested implementation that we have today. If the exponent were to be templated in the future, a default template parameter could be used to retain back compatibility. Best regards, Chris.