4 ms·
gmp is not exact. It's just arbitrary-precision. There's a very large difference. Exact arithmetic handles numbers like pi with infinite precision. When you
by chowells 8y ago
gmp is not exact. It's just arbitrary-precision. There's a very large difference. Exact arithmetic handles numbers like pi with infinite precision. When you use gmp, you pre-select select a constant for pi with a precision known ahead of time. In the real world, 64 bits of pi is more than enough for almost every purpose, so whatever. It's fine. But there's a huge conceptual gap between that and exact arithmetic.
- rurban 8y agoI never said that. For simple, non-symbolic languages gmp is still the best. Lisp is of course better, optimizing expressions symbolically as far as possible, eg. to rationals, and using bignum and bigint's internally. As exact as possible. perl6 does it too, just 100x slower.