important change in mpfr

[Will Galway]

Your proposed change sounds like an improvement, but I'd like to
encourage you to consider using a more traditional sexagesimal
(radix-60) representation instead.  This would have the obvious
advantage of being more memory-efficient, and the use of a sublinear
radix-conversion algorithm should still allow a reasonably low cost
for converting to decimal (or binary).

I hope that you, Torbjorn, and the other MPFR/GMP developers give my
proposal the serious consideration that it deserves.  Happy April 1st.

-- Regards, Will
( mailto:galway at math.uiuc.edu  http://www.math.uiuc.edu/~galway )

On Saturday April 1, 2006 at 08:54:03, Paul Zimmermann wrote:
 >        Dear mpfr users,
 > 
 > we would like to warn you about an important change in the next version of
 > mpfr. Up from the next release (2.3.0) mpfr will use a decimal internal 
 > representation instead of a binary one. The main motivation for that change
 > is the fact that the revision of IEEE 754 (http://www.validlab.com/754R/)
 > will include decimal formats. We anticipate that in ten years, the main 
 > machine integer and floating-point formats will be in decimal, and the
 > current binary formats will soon become obsolete, and/or very slow.
 > 
 > We apologize for any problems mpfr users might have. Of course this will
 > break the binary compatibility of the library, but we promise a decimal
 > compatibility up from version 2.3.0.
 > 
 > We strongly request the GMP developers to anticipate that decimal change too.
 > This will boost all applications of GMP and MPFR to bank accounting.
 > 
 > For the mpfr team,
 > Paul Zimmermann
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