Thanks, John. --- On Fri, 6/3/11, Peter Bex <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Peter Bex <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Different factorial results > To: "John Cowan" <[email protected]> > Cc: "Steve Graham" <[email protected]>, "Chicken-users" > <[email protected]> > Date: Friday, June 3, 2011, 1:06 PM > On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 12:49:26PM > -0400, John Cowan wrote: > > Steve Graham scripsit: > > > > > Thanks, Mario. Worked like a charm. > Why is that not part of the base > > > package? > > > > Licensing. The numbers egg has to be GPL, > because it depends on the GMP > > (GNU Multi-precision Library) which is GPL. > > This is no longer true and hasn't been for over a year > now. > The current "numbers" code is a heavily modified version of > Scheme48's > code, which is itself based on the MIT Scheme code which > was BSD-licensed > at some point in time. > > > The overall license for Chicken, however, is BSD. > > There are alternatives to the GMP, but it is > > the gold standard: fast, accurate, space-conserving. > > The GMP-based numbers egg was actually very slow because it > made heavy > use of finalizers and malloc()ed memory. The new code > is a bit faster. > Probably a GMP-based numbers egg which uses Chicken-managed > memory would > be faster still, but the license annoys me and I still have > hopes to get > bignums in Chicken core someday :) > > It's not in core mostly because it would make things slower > (though I'm > not 100% convinced of that; there's type dispatching for > fixnums/flonums > already anyway) and because it is an extra-large additional > pile of code. > > Cheers, > Peter > -- > http://sjamaan.ath.cx > -- > "The process of preparing programs for a digital computer > is especially attractive, not only because it can be > economically > and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be > an aesthetic > experience much like composing poetry or music." > > > -- Donald Knuth > _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
