Re: [Chicken-users] Different factorial results

[Steve Graham]

Thanks, John.

--- On Fri, 6/3/11, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:

> From: Peter Bex <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Different factorial results
> To: "John Cowan" <address@hidden>
> Cc: "Steve Graham" <address@hidden>, "Chicken-users" <address@hidden>
> Date: Friday, June 3, 2011, 1:06 PM
> On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 12:49:26PM
> -0400, John Cowan 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.
> 
> This is no longer true and hasn't been for over a year
> now.
> The current "numbers" code is a heavily modified version of
> Scheme48's
> code, which is itself based on the MIT Scheme code which
> was BSD-licensed
> at some point in time.
> 
> > The overall license for Chicken, however, is BSD.
> > There are alternatives to the GMP, but it is
> > the gold standard: fast, accurate, space-conserving.
> 
> The GMP-based numbers egg was actually very slow because it
> made heavy
> use of finalizers and malloc()ed memory.  The new code
> is a bit faster.
> Probably a GMP-based numbers egg which uses Chicken-managed
> memory would
> be faster still, but the license annoys me and I still have
> hopes to get
> bignums in Chicken core someday :)
> 
> It's not in core mostly because it would make things slower
> (though I'm
> not 100% convinced of that; there's type dispatching for
> fixnums/flonums
> already anyway) and because it is an extra-large additional
> pile of code.
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter
> -- 
> http://sjamaan.ath.cx
> --
> "The process of preparing programs for a digital computer
>  is especially attractive, not only because it can be
> economically
>  and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be
> an aesthetic
>  experience much like composing poetry or music."
>            
>            
>     -- Donald Knuth
>