Not a bug report but a suggestion

[Max Neunhoeffer]

Dear authors of GMP,

First I really want to express my compliments about GMP! It is an
astonishing piece of software. I am particularly impressed about
the hardware dependent optimizations. You did a very good job!

However, I found a place where there is still room for improvement:
Conversion of big integers into string output with respect to base 10.

I happened to calculate 12345678901^11111 (it has about 112000 decimal
digits). This took only 0.1 seconds or so but to write the result out
took about 3 seconds.

I wrote a little C routine using GMP to accomplish this task in about
0.14 seconds on the same machine.

The trick is simple: Just divide the number by a big power of 10 to
approximately cut it in two equal pieces and repeat this process.

I append my code, which is at the moment only good for positive 
integers but shows the principle. Please feel free to use the idea
or even the code. 

I am pretty sure that you already know this trick but as far as I see
it is not in the GMP library. Perhaps you are interested...

Best regards,
  Max Neunhoeffer

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grips.c
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