On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 08:45, Andrew Whitworth via RT <parrotbug-follo...@parrotcode.org> wrote: > On Thu Feb 05 08:40:47 2009, particle wrote: >> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 08:26, Andrew Whitworth via RT >> <parrotbug-follo...@parrotcode.org> wrote: >> > 1) Are we going to be relying on libraries to handle our BigInt/BigNum >> > implementations, or are we intending to roll our own? >> >> we can't rely on external libraries, whether for bignum, unicode, gc, >> or anything else. we can detect and use them, however, if they exist. >> >> ~jerry >> > > Okay, maybe "rely" was the wrong word to use. Current implementation of > BigInt.pmc uses GMP if it's available, else it throws exceptions that > there is no bug number library present to implement the behavior. Same > is true of the unicode charset and ICU. We don't require ICU or GMP to > build parrot, but we don't implement these behaviors without them. > but we do implement these behaviors, at least some of them. for example, i don't have icu installed, but i can still use french quotes in rakudo. i'll get an exception if i try to downcase a string of japanese text (a silly example, but it won't throw if i have icu) because not all unicode functionality has been implemented natively *yet*.
> Question is: Are we going to do this same thing for BigNum (use a > library if present, throw sane exceptions otherwise), or are we going to > roll our own BigNum implementation? > we will roll our own bignum, and give users the ability to use gmp or another external library at configure time. until we do roll our own, we should provide a default implementation that throws descriptive exceptions. ~jerry
