At 02:49 AM 7/6/2001 -0400, Uri Guttman wrote:
>question:
>
>can you declare at the language level a scalar to be a bigint or bignum?
I think Larry's planning on that, yep. For arrays and hashes at least, I
expect, and I don't see why not for scalars too.
>that means that native format is never used. the reason might be
>something like a fixed point decimal value for money with 2 decimal
>places. the bigint/float thingies imply decimal math and that also means
>a decimal math library. this came up in #perl in a discussion about
>bcd. i think a true decimal math package for this would be useful and
>faster than a char string based one.
We won't be using a char-based string math library--it'll all be some
internal binary format or other. (I can make a good argument for it being
done with a base 10 exponent rather than a base 2 one. I can see doing it
all in decimal rather than binary, but I can't think of a processor newer
than the 6502 that does BCD math. (Well, OK, I think the System/3x0
processors do--I suppose that counts))
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
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