Re: Using the GNU GMP Library for Bignums in Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

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  > No doubt people occasionally want C-like formatting (i.e., print a
  > negative number modulo 2**W where W is the word width), but once
  > we have bignums the notion of the "word width" becomes dubious,

In a theoretical sense, yes -- but I doubt that that matters in
practice.  In practice, I think, the cases where one wants hexadecimal
are cases where there is a word width.

  > and in practice it's cleaner and more useful to print hexadecimal
  > integers in the usual mathematical way.

Would you tell me about some of the cases where you wanted hexadecimal
output and you wanted negative numbers to use a minus sign?

I ask because I am skeptical that such cases exist.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
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