New: BigDecimals

After BigIntegers, the next logical step was the implementation of BigDecimals. I implemented them using BigIntegers, because a BigDecimal is not much more than a BigInteger divided (or multiplied) by - scaled by - a power of 10.

Unlike BigIntegers, my implementation of BigDecimals does not use any assembler, so it should be usable anywhere BigIntegers can be used.

The BigDecimals are mostly modelled after the interface of the BigDecimal class in Java, but, like BigIntegers, made more Delphi-like. Java BigDecimals do not support operator overloading, while my BigDecimals do. This makes the handling of rounding and precision a little different too.

Anyway, I think that every Delphi should not only have BigIntegers, but BigDecimals too. Have fun with them. They can be found in the same .zip file as BigIntegers. Just read more about them on my website.

The next step is BigDecimal math, like trigonometric, exponential functions etc. One other step will be to host this on GitHub. I am also thinking of writing prime, factorization and other mathematically useful functions for BigIntegers.

New: BigIntegers

I wrote a new implementation of BigIntegers (almost unlimited size integers) for Delphi. It uses assembler for the low level stuff, although there is a PUREPASCAL version for each of these routines too. Instead of using the GPL-licensed GNU Multi-Precision (GMP) library, I wrote everything from scratch, without using any code from others.

I think it is pretty fast, especially because I optimized many of the routines, either by techniques like loop unrolling or using 64 bits at once, or by using bitwise tricks, or by high-level algorithms like Burnikel-Ziegler, Karatsuba, Toom-Cook 3-way, etc. Results are checked with results generated by .NET. The C# test program is included.

In the course of writing this, I read an enormous numbers of publications on these subjects and I learned a lot, not only about the maths involved, but also about many other mathematical notions. Not so easy for a dentist. I also had some good help on StackOverflow.

Go take a look at my website. I think every Delphi should have BigIntegers.