Re: [boost] New Boost.XInt Library, request preliminary review

Subject: Re: [boost] New Boost.XInt Library, request preliminary review
From: Scott McMurray (me22.ca+boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-04-02 14:55:50

On 2 April 2010 14:31, DE <satan66613_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> i can not imagine any circumstances under which this stuff would be
> useful can you?
>

In crypto and compression a non-finite result is never useful, so
people writing in those domains would probably use what I call a
finite_xint that throws instead of generating such special values.

For a fixed-point numeric application, though, it's plausible that the
person would rather get out any information that does calculate
properly, and just be able to know at the end whether the result is
precise or not.  Certainly people wanting them to replace current
floating-point code would likely rather have them act like the
floating point values did, and not throw exceptions, which means
defining reasonable semantics for operations on special values.