>>>>> "Henry" == Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> writes:
Henry> Thanks for the pointers; I wasn't aware of these packages.
Henry> While we're talking about this stuff, how come Common Lisp & Maxima don't simply use GNU MP (GMP) ?
Perhaps CL predates GMP? In any case, I suspect that bignums in most
applications are less than a 5 words (160 bits or so), so having
to call out to GMP is probably not worth the effort. Only in special
applications like crypto and math are bignums really big, so perhaps
it wasn't worth the effort to hook in gmp when the implementations
were being created.
(There's a comment in the CMUCL sources, I think, that says most
bignums are just one word bigger than a fixnum, Don't know how true
that was back then and whether that's still true today.)
Henry> http://gmplib.org/
Henry> A lot of Common Lisp's have a foreign function interface
Henry> which should enable the ability to call at least some of
Henry> these functions.
GCL uses GMP. I don't know of any other implementation that uses
GMP. (Clisp has it's own specialized implementation which is, by all
accounts, as good as GMP.)
Ray