On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:58 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Pierre CHANSON <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>> I was wondering if there was a package to manipulate floats like the MPFR
>> library in C...
>>
>
> One issue with MPFR is the licensing, which is GNU.
>

No, its LGPL (http://www.mpfr.org/).  Now something I didn't know and just
read, you can even statically link an LGPL library, as long as you provide


>
> I wonder if Pharo couldn't get a special licence for embedding as "MPFR has
> continuously been supported by the INRIA <http://www.inria.fr/>...".
>
> Pharo is now 32-bit and uses the floatplugin to do the actual fast math.
>
> Pharo with the 64-bit system will be able to do better and the float
> plugin will have to be rewritten anyway.
>
> But MPFR could be put into a plugin.
>
> As far as I am concerned, I'd rather get something based on GMP (
> https://gmplib.org/) but we are there in GNU territory. Which is not what
> I want for commercial apps.
>


Why GMP? From the timings table it looks like GMP is missing trigonometric
functions, and  that MPFR is equally as fast as GMP.
cheers -ben


>
> This table: http://www.mpfr.org/mpfr-current/timings.html is showing some
> LGPL licencing that may be easier to deal with. But for sure, none of that
> is MIT :-(
>
> Phil
>
>
>
>> Then I found in http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/Web/Draft/Float.pdf that
>> using ScaledDecimal allows exact arithmetics. So I guess ScaledDecimal is
>> the best class to use for playing with 20 decimals numbers ? :)
>>
>> Thanks !
>>
>> Pierre
>>
>
>
>
>
>

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