Talk:Arbitrary-precision integers (included): Difference between revisions

→‎Use of external libraries: Least effort and idiomatic solutions.
(→‎Use of external libraries: Try Long multiplication. Also, consider asking for specific algorithms.)
(→‎Use of external libraries: Least effort and idiomatic solutions.)
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:I guess I'm trying to make the '... (included)' tasks show more of what comes with very little effort, and is known to work, with the language itself. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 09:23, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
::So, you're looking for what people can do within the language or with a very common add-on library? (In some languages, it's normal and expected to be using extra libraries for things, and so the core language itself has very little functionality.) –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 11:49, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
: Just because the mechanism behind a task is already shown somewhere else doesn't mean we shouldn't allow the usage of that mechanism to solve a different problem. If we were to generalize that as a rule, most of the tasks on Rosetta Code would be defunct because we have tasks for looping and flow control. By their very nature, people tend to go with least-effort solutions, and for any given language, the least-effort solution to an expert will be idiomatic for that language. If a language has good support for arbitrary precision, an expert in that language is likely to use the native support. If the language has poor support, the expert in that language will prefer to pull in an outside library. --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 16:38, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
 
I was rather hoping people would demonstrate how to write an arbitrary-precision / bignum library, in their preferred language, from scratch. I've been scribbling ideas on the train / bus to and from work. Um, err, yes ... in VBScript. Of course, it wouldn't necessarily be very efficient in that language, but, once working, it might be better in VB6 ... --[[User:Axtens|Axtens]] 13:31, 13 February 2010 (UTC)