On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 10:26 AM, John Maddock <boost.regex@virgin.net>wrote:
OK, clearly it's not a field I'm familiar with - for that reason I'd
prefer not to be the one to write a backend for that - or at least I would need some considerable help - but I see no real obstacles to supporting such a type providing you don't want the transcendental functions. If someone were willing to be the guinea pig, then it might make a good test case for seeing how easy it is for someone other than me to extend the library?
This is something I would be willing to contribute but probably not until after the formal review.
Nod, thanks. Also just realized that while a simple adapter backend:
template <class BigInteger> class exact_float;
Would be more or less trivial as far as the arithmetic goes, other stuff like string conversion would be *much* more complex, exactly which conversions and/or string formatting should be supported would require some careful thought.
Yes, agreed regarding the trickiness of string conversions :( I guess if one doesn't want or need to implement such facilities, one could just throw on such overloads. For many computational geometry applications, the inputs are built-in floating point types, which I would imagine would be trivially (or, at least, straightforwardly) convertible to the desired exact floating point type, so string conversion may not be necessary. - Jeff