Re: factor inconsistencies/limits?

[James Youngman]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 8:04 PM, James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:

> I have a working GMP-based version (essentially, it's the example
> taken from the GMP docs that you mentioned earlier).  For the moment,
> the code always uses GMP if it's available.  The GMP version is
> dramatically faster for the pathalogical case mentioned in the docs,
> and about 2x slower for "easy" cases with small integers.

It turns out that it needs a little more work, since it does not
currently produce the factors in ascending order.    I guess we
probably can't spuriously change that behaviour.

Options:
1. Sort the factors before printing them
2. Bluster that we can break the rules for N>2^64, since that never
worked before anyway
3. Stare hard at the code to find a way to efficiently do the
factorisation and emit the factors in numerical order

James.