On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Paul Eggert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "James Youngman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> Although libgmp itself has no further dependencies other than the C >> library, this is still a large-ish extra dependency. Should we also >> introduce a --without-gmp option to configure? > > Yes, particularly if it's added to 'expr'.
See the patch I posted yesterday. >> I also remember Jim mentioning something about supporting large >> numbers in expr. That seems feasible, though based on the number of >> discussions over the last year or two I would suggest that perhaps >> using GMP in "seq" might also be a win; thoughts? > > They'd both be wins, I'd say. > > Also "test", right? Though that's lower priority. As far as I can see, the only places where test handles numbers are -lt, -gt, -le, -ge, -eq, -ne Here the comparison is done with strintcmp, which compares numbers without converting them from a string. That is, strintcmp already works to arbitrary precision. -l This introduces an integer constant, the value of which is the length of the following string /usr/bin/test -l foo -eq 3 ; echo $? 0 Here I believe there is no need for bignums; a size_t is wide enough to represent the size of any string, and the argument is a string taken from the command line. In fact the length is immediately printed and handled as for -lt and similar anyway. -t Here the following argument is a file descriptor. Since they need to be representible as an int, there is no need for arbitrary precision here either. So as far as I can see, "test" already supports arbitrarily long numbers in all the cases where it makes sense. James. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
