[Issue 5765] ^^ and << with BigInts

[d-bugmail at puremagic.com]

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5765



--- Comment #6 from bearophile_hugs at eml.cc 2011-03-23 10:55:03 PDT ---
(In reply to comment #5)

> That's a false consistency. T ^^ int  is the common operation, not T ^^ T.
> Really. BigInt ^^ BigInt isn't a BigInt. It's too big to be representable.

Python3 (and Lisp-family languages, and others) use multi-precision integers on
default, but most people don't store large numbers in them, most times they
store little numbers, and most people doesn't use them for cryptography.

I am not going to use D BigInts for cryptography. 99.9% times inside BigInts
I'll keep numbers less than 63 bit long. I'd like to use BigInt as in Python to
avoid the problems caused by int, because currently in D there are no integer
overflow tests, because Walter doesn't want them.

The first and by a wide margin most important purpose of multi-precision
integers is not to represent huge numbers or to do cryptography, but to free
the mind of the programmer from being forced to think all the time about
possible overflows breaking the code he/she is writing, freeing that part of
attention, and allowing him/her to focus more on the algorithm instead. This is
one of the causes that explain why Python is good to write prototypes, allowing
to implement algorithms faster than most other languages (D included).

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