wbhart / Mpir

Copyright 1991, 1996, 1999, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Copyright 2008, 2009 William Hart

This file is part of the MPIR Library.

The MPIR Library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The MPIR Library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with the MPIR Library; see the file COPYING.LIB. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

		THE MPIR LIBRARY

MPIR is a fork of the GNU Multi Precision library (GMP -- see http://gmplib.org)

MPIR is a library for arbitrary precision arithmetic, operating on signed integers, rational numbers, and floating point numbers. It has a rich set of functions, and the functions have a regular interface.

MPIR is designed to be as fast as possible, both for small operands and huge operands. The speed is achieved by using fullwords as the basic arithmetic type, by using fast algorithms, with carefully optimized assembly code for the most common inner loops for lots of CPUs, and by a general emphasis on speed (instead of simplicity or elegance).

GMP/MPIR is believed to be faster than any other similar library. Its advantage increases with operand sizes for certain operations, since MPIR in many cases has asymptotically faster algorithms.

MPIR is free software and may be freely copied on the terms contained in the files COPYING.LIB and COPYING (most of MPIR is under the former, some under the latter).

		OVERVIEW OF MPIR

There are four classes of functions in MPIR.

1. Signed integer arithmetic functions (mpz). These functions are intended to be easy to use, with their regular interface. The associated type is `mpz_t'.

2. Rational arithmetic functions (mpq). For now, just a small set of functions necessary for basic rational arithmetics. The associated type is `mpq_t'.

3. Floating-point arithmetic functions (mpf). If the C type double' doesn't give enough precision for your application, declare your variables asmpf_t' instead, set the precision to any number desired, and call the functions in the mpf class for the arithmetic operations.

4. Positive-integer, hard-to-use, very low overhead functions are in the mpn class. No memory management is performed. The caller must ensure enough space is available for the results. The set of functions is not regular, nor is the calling interface. These functions accept input arguments in the form of pairs consisting of a pointer to the least significant word, and an integral size telling how many limbs (= words) the pointer points to.

   Almost all calculations, in the entire package, are made by calling these low-level functions.

For more information on how to use MPIR, please refer to the documentation. It is composed from the file mpir.texi, and can be displayed on the screen or printed. How to do that, as well how to build the library, is described in the INSTALL file in this directory.

		REPORTING BUGS

If you find a bug in the library, please make sure to tell us about it!

You should first check the MPIR web pages at http://www.mpir.org/. There will be patches for all known serious bugs there.

Report bugs to our development list: http://groups.google.com/group/mpir-devel.
What information is needed in a good bug report is described in the manual.
The same address can be used for suggesting modifications and enhancements.

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