--- Andy Little wrote:

...

There may be an implementation of gcd<> that is more efficient even if it works solely on big_integral<> numbers.

Surely it would make sense to specialise this for big_integral.

Yes.

...

Or there may not, but for now, I shouldn't rule out anything that promises to make big_integral<> operations less expensive.

But these operations will now be unneccessarily expensive for small_int types.

Then there should be a gcd specialization for them, too, right? One that doesn't require recursive apply2<> calls?

Your version of gcd looks is obviously optimised for big_integral.

Really? I haven't even taken advantage of anything that's specific to big_integral<>, but okay... ...if I ever get big_integral<> to work.

However my requirements on rational would be for a large number of smallint types. I hope you will take this into account in the design and favour the implementation more towards small_int types as well.

Okay.

OK maybe that would be quicker, and give better error messages. But you will need a tag dispatch mechanism anyway wont you?, to avoid a large number of specialisations.

Yes. Like I said, I'll do that. Cromwell D. Enage Discover Yahoo! Find restaurants, movies, travel and more fun for the weekend. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/weekend.html