Re: What about big integers in Ada 2005?

[<adaworks@sbcglobal.net>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
news:1x4pe4pv41qsn$.m5c5jawjqcpq.dlg@40tude.net...
> On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 05:24:17 GMT, adaworks@sbcglobal.net wrote:
> >
> > Also, I am teaching a class in functional programming languages this Quarter
> > and wrote a little factorial program in Scheme that shows that we can do
> >
> >             (factorial 45)
> >
> > and get a perfectly good answer.   Anyone know of an Ada package that
> > can do that?
>
I apologize.  I did not mean to imply that BCD is the only way to do 45!  There
are better implementations possible.  The point was that this is not something
one can do with the present implementations of Ada.   Every compiler I know
of is limited by the word size of the platform.   Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, and
lots of other languages are at a level of abstraction better suited to the
representation of problems involving large numbers.
>
> But I agree that Ada should have Universal_Integer or its equivalent
> available for users. And this time one should not repeat errors made with
> Unbounded_String!
>
We are in agreement on this.  It can be done with a home-grown package,
but having implemented a partial version of it, I can say it is not a trivial
thing to do in Ada.
>
Richard Riehle