From: William Kempf (sirwillard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-09-21 10:59:47
--- In boost_at_[hidden], Beman Dawes <beman_at_e...> wrote:
> At 01:53 PM 9/21/2000 +0000, William Kempf wrote:
>
> >He was responding to my post, and I've seen his bigint before, so
I
> >feel entitled to respond here.
> Presumably the interfaces should be either the same or very similar?
At least very similar. A bigint type leaves a few operations
ambiguous as to implementation. For instance, bit manipulation
operators may not be intuitive when the bitsize is variable.
Typically the implementations I've seen assume bits to be 0 beyond
the size of the actual storage for this. More complex is the shift
operators. >> will obviously drop a bit the same as it does with
built in integral types. But what about <<? Does it drop a bit or
scale the size?
Bill Kempf