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Moin,

On 23-Jul-01 John Peacock tried to scribble about:
>  Tels wrote:
> > 
> > "However, if you throw in a negative operand you get some very strange
> > behavior." - Indeed ;)
> > 
> > I am unsure how to repeat this. The result of -1 & -1 highly depends on
> > the
> > width of a Perl scalar. Since Bigint is by definition "infinite width",
> > the
> > result should probably be something like +inf :-) Seriously, I do not
> > know
> > how to repeat Perl's behaviour without assuming a specific width.
> > Anyway,
> > your program looking for -1 & -1 beeing 4294967295 will fail on any
> > platform not having 32 bit (like 64 bit).
> > 
> > Has anybody any comments or ideas on what to do?
> > 
>  
>  Yes, I have a comment.  Don't support And, Or, XOr, Not, Shift, etc. on 
>  any BigInt objects.  

Shift, And, Xor, and Or make perfect sense with positive numbers.

Anyway, I am sure you want to tell me it is possible to "remove" something
from BigInt, while always telling me I can't "remove" or "change" anything
which would breaking existing code.

>  They are artifacts of the underlying C-Library 
>  being able to do Boolean math on integers.  

1 & 2 is defined even for BigInts.

I agree that one can not support negative values or do bit-wise-not, and
these things will stay out. But what is already there will remain.

>  As you yourself state, 
>  BigInt is infinite width - Not will flip every bit out to infinity; let 
>  me know when you get there.  ;~)

Schedules for tomorrow ;)

>  I never thought these were good additions to the module.  

Thats not the point. Somebody added them long ago, and now they must stay.

>  I'll even
>  bet you I can find the e-mail that I said they were not appropriate
>  additions.  Boolean math was never what BigInt/BigFloat was intended to 
>  deal with.

But it was added none-theless.

Any more ideas?

Cheers,

Tels

- -- 
perl -MMath::String -e 'print Math::String-> from_number("215960156869840440586892398248"),"\
n"'

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