GMP division plans

[Torbjorn Granlund]

Now that GMP 4.2 is finally finished and releases, the GMP developers are
concentrating on GMP 5 and GMP 6.

Every major GMP release has had a new low-level division interface, and the
division interface of the previous release has been declared obsolete (but
the old interface is kept for compatibility reasons).

GMP 5 will be no exception to this tradition; its division interface will
not look like anything previously seen.

For GMP 6, we intend to drop division from GMP altogether, urging users to
use other operations instead to complete their computations.  We believe
this will be a significant improvement, since truncating division is not
only slow, it is an algebraically unpleasant operation.

But before we start removing the files, we would like to solicit the
feedback from GMP users.  What do you think, should we drop division from
GMP 6, or should we invent another creative division interface for that
release?  Do you have any suggestions for how such an interface should
look?

Since compatibility is important, we will of course keep the deleted
division functions even for GMP 6 and GMP 7.

--
Torbjörn