Re: [Chicken-users] Different factorial results

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

Hi John,

On Fri, 3 Jun 2011 12:49:26 -0400 John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:

> Steve Graham scripsit:
>
>> Thanks, Mario.  Worked like a charm.  Why is that not part of the base
>> package?
>
> Licensing.  The numbers egg has to be GPL, because it depends on the GMP
> (GNU Multi-precision Library) which is GPL.  The overall license for
> Chicken, however, is BSD.  There are alternatives to the GMP, but it is
> the gold standard: fast, accurate, space-conserving.

Licensing is actually not the reason (see
http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/numbers#license).  The numbers egg is
no longer based on libgmp.

The full numeric tower support has some implications on performance,
size and complexity of the core system.  So far it's been decided that
it should be left out of the core.


Best wishes.
Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario