I've not dug into the bignum code (and probably won't). I will, however, tend to avoid bignum for serious work.

I also found that bignum is consistent, at least for small integers and small powers: for any base except 1 (I suspect 1**x is optimized away), and for any exponent, $x**$y returns NaN for 0 < $x ≤ 1000 for $y = -1 and when $x == 10 and -100 ≤ $y ≤ -1.

So, my bigger question is: why isn't this a caveat in bignums documentation?

emc

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.

—Igor Sikorsky, reported in AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.

In reply to Re^4: use bignum and exponentiation by swampyankee
in thread use bignum and exponentiation by swampyankee

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