On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:08:30AM -0400, Aaron Sherman wrote: > On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Darren Duncan <dar...@darrenduncan.net>wrote: > > > > > What is the difference between Parrot bignums and gmp? Could Parrot not > > just use gmp to implement its bignums? -- Darren Duncan > > > > Parrot does use GMP. What we're discussing is how appropriate those are for > Perl 6. My feeling is that the closer Perl 6 can get to using GMP directly, > the better. If we need to wrap Parrot BigInt in a Perl 6 class, that > wouldn't be terrible.
It ultimately needs to be wrapped into a Perl 6 Int -- there's not a separate "big integer" type. Or, put another way, we need Rakudo's Int class to be smart enough to adapt to using a bigint representation (e.g., Parrot's BigInt PMC) whenever the values are outside of a native int. Pm > I've been trying to get that to work myself, but I've been struggling with > getting a PIR BigInt into a Perl 6 attribute via Q:PIR. When I do this: > > .local pmc value, attr > .local pmc b > value = find_lex "$value" > b = new ['BigInt'] > b = value > attr = find_lex "$field" > attr = b > > Where $field is the variable I want to store, $field.WHAT is Int(). Note that .WHAT won't typically work on Parrot native values, unless they've somehow been registered into the P6object framework. Pm
