Re: [PATCH 1/2] Support arbitrarily-long numbers with GNU MP.

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 10:25 PM, James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
> 2008-07-27  James Youngman  <address@hidden>
>
>        Support arbitrarily-long numbers with GNU MP.
>        * m4/gmp.m4: New file; adds cu_GMP, which detects GNU MP.
>        * configure.ac: Use cu_GMP.

At the moment, the cu_GMP macro will always use GNU MP if it is available.

$ ls -lh /usr/lib/libgmp.so.3.4.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 253K 2008-04-09 08:23 /usr/lib/libgmp.so.3.4.2

Although libgmp itself has no further dependencies other than the C
library, this is still a large-ish extra dependency.   Should we also
introduce a --without-gmp option to configure?

I also remember Jim mentioning something about supporting large
numbers in expr.  That seems feasible, though based on the number of
discussions over the last year or two I would suggest that perhaps
using GMP in "seq" might also be a win; thoughts?

James.