Another performance question

[Kevin Ryde]

Michel Bardiaux <mbardiaux at peaktime.be> writes:
>
> What would be the impact,
> risks, etc of having flags (1 in mpz, 2 in mpq) telling that a limb is
> *not* a pointer but a number making by itself a 1-integer limb?

I suppose that could work, though every function reading an mpz would
need to check this flag and change the way it accesses the data.

But we're probably inclined to leave this to an application.  If
you've got a lot of small numbers you probably don't even want to be
making function calls to handle them, instead establish some fixnum
versus bignum like various language interpreters do (lisps, smalltalk,
etc).