Re: [RFC] intdiv()
| From: | Andrea Faulds | Date: | Tue, 15 Jul 2014 12:20:12 +0000 |
| Subject: | Re: [RFC] intdiv() | ||
| References: | 1 2 3 4 | Groups: | php.internals |
| Request: | Send a blank email to internals+get-75537@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
On 15 Jul 2014, at 06:17, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com> wrote:
> Why not? bcmath is in core since forever and has no external
> requirements, gmp builds practically everywhere too. AFAIR all distros
> have it.
Partly practicality, partly principle. A barebones installation of PHP may not include gmp or
bcmath. If my bigint RFC got in, it would have to include the former, but that is a possible future
and not the present reality.
I should point out that while, yes, bcmath could be used here, it is not efficient to do it by
string manipulation (this is a type *natively supported* by literally every semi-modern processor
and an operation built into C!). Also, gmp does the wrong thing, as will give you a gmp number
result, whereas what I want is an integer. To use gmp is just as hackish as doing a floating-point
division and casting, as the values we pass in would be converted to big integers, divided, then the
resulting big integer would need to be manually converted back to a long.
It would make far more sense to simply support this basic, widely-supported and somewhat common
operation than to encourage programmers to use poor workarounds which do not even work when a basic
PHP installation is used.
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/