On Jan 23, 2008 5:33 AM, mabshoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Jan 23, 2:29 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Jan 22, 2008 11:48 PM, Paul Zimmermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > <SNIP> > > > > I guess 'long' is based on GMP too, does it make sense to have two > > > concurrent > > > interfaces to GMP integers? > > > Paul Zimmermann > > > > long is _not_ based on GMP. long is implemented from scratch in C by the > > Python developers. It is completely independent from GMP, and has much > > different performance characteristics, storage formats, etc. > > FYI: The arbitrary precision arithmetic in Python 3K will be based on > GMP. Somebody posted prototype bindings on one of the GMP mailing > lists about 2 months ago. > <SNIP> > Cheers, > Michael
I'm skeptical even though I wish you were right. Just because somebody posted some prototype bindings on Py3K mailing list doesn't mean anything about what will actually go into Py3K. I remember watching Guido v. Rosum walking around at Pycon 2005 in Washington D.C.. Basically people would walk up to him, and try to convince him to make some change to Python. It was the first time I heard the phrase "this conversation is over", which he would utter when pushed too hard. Anyway, I searched the Py3K mailing list and there were some patches in October 2007. But they were just hacks to see how Python's standard benchmark timings would change with GMP versus without. Having GMP replacing all integer arithmetic made Python 20% slower (since GMP doesn't special case small integers and Python is very optimized for small integers). Another patch just used GMP for Python long's and only made Python's standard benchmark 2% slower. But there was no discussion that I could find, especially nothing by Guido who has final say about everything in Python, about the many subtle issues with making Python depend on GMP by default. I also remember seeing a very nice talk by Guido at SciPy 2006 in July 2006 about how Py3K as about a year away :-), i.e., might come out in late 2007. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
