Re: Additions to the gh_ interface.

[Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>]

>  > I don't know how easy bignums are to manipulate from C code.  By
>  > Aubrey's reputation, the primitives present are probably exactly the
>  > right ones for SCM's purposes, but not what you'd expect for other
>  > purposes.
> 
> Would an interface to the gmp library help?

It depends on what you mean.  The simplest kind of interface to GMP
wouldn't help at all --- you need to take all of Guile's arithmetic
primitives and change them to work with GMP, instead of Aubrey's
home-spun bignums.  That's a big job.

I asked Aubrey why he wasn't using GMP; he said he found GMP's number
allocation rules too clumsy.  If you're just using bignums to catch
the occasional fixnum overflow, then he's probably right.  But if
you're doing real bignum work, I think the speed of arithmetic
operations would be more important.

I have a question, though: what do people need bignums for?  Aside
from handling the occasional fixnum overflow, and making the numeric
system prettier, that is.  What applications benefit from bignums?