Subject: Re: Big Numbers From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 23:02:34 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3212348552357456@naggum.net> * Barry Margolin <barmar@genuity.net> | There are bignum libraries available for most programming languages. If | I had an application written in language X and I needed to add the | ability to check for Mersenne primes to it, I would simply link in that | library rather than rewrite the whole thing in Lisp just because it has | built-in bignum support. CLISP's bignum library was recently made available as C/C++ classes. I have not looked at it, but there is no way to make the regular integers in C/C++ overflow properly and spontaneously create a new type, so you would have to make _some_ changes to your source code to use bignums, not to mention what you have to do when bignums are to be used in a call to some other function that expects a regular integer. Several _disjoint_ integer types is not a huge win as far as language features go. /// --