[MPFR] Re: important change in mpfr

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2006-04-04 11:37:24 +0300, Elias P. TSIGARIDAS wrote:
> Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
> > Paul.Zimmermann at loria.fr (Paul Zimmermann) writes:
> > 
> >   We strongly request the GMP developers to anticipate that
> >   decimal change too. This will boost all applications of GMP and
> >   MPFR to bank accounting.
> >   
> > I must say that I think is a very serious mistake.  Decimal
> > arithmetic is known to be very inefficient!
> > 
> > For GMP 5, we will use base-100 arithmetic throughout (except in
> > the input an doutput functions that will accept binary numbers).
> > Base-100 will be ten times faster than base-10, of course.
> > 
> Why not base-1000 then? It will be 100 times faster than base 10.
> 
> Perhaps base-10^k is the best solution after all.
> It will be 10^(k-1) times faster than base-10.

Yep, but to make some sense to the representation, numbers should
be represented by a tree: an n-digit number should be represented
by 2 (n/2)-digit numbers in some high base 10^k, and recursively. :)

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA