Re: [boost] Re: Re: [rational] Announcing new maintainer -- call forfeature requests

From: Sylvain Pion (Sylvain.Pion_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-07 15:24:57

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 06:41:56PM -0400, Beman Dawes wrote:
> "Andras Erdei" <aerdei_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
> news:7fe28deb05040601041ad29463_at_mail.gmail.com...
> 
> > my guess on the major usage of rational<> would be people burnt by floats
> > making CAD, image processing, signal processing, statistical etc 
> > applications
> 
> One of the rational<> issues is "Should it be standardized?"
> 
> The LWG looked at rational<> for TR1, and decided that it would make more 
> sense to consider it later, when a big int class was available. There is now 
> a proposed big int class, so the rational<> question may come up again.
> 
> One of the questions that the LWG will as is "Are there enough real-world 
> uses to justify the addition of rational<> to the Standard Library?"
> 
> Thus it might be helpful if real-world users (if any) of boost::rational 
> would occasionally make themselves known.

I don't know if it qualifies as real-world, but CGAL (www.cgal.org)
provides a Quotient<> class and uses it heavily.
It is basically the same thing as boost::rational, although I have
not checked the differences in detail, nor tried it.
It is used together with big ints or big floats, mostly.

As far as standardization is concerned, I think a big int
class should go together with a big rational class
(which can benefit from being template).

-- 
Sylvain