Hallo all,

I just tried out squeak.
I use Smalltalk for private number theoretical observations.
Maybe it sounds odd, but I am used to Smalltalk (I use VA in my job) and
I recognized that it is rather fast on large number computations.
For example I computed a prime number with > 700 digits in Smalltalk in
about 20 hours on a Pentium III machine :o)

So far I used VA for that but wanted to take a look also at other
flavours. Squeak is interesting, because it has cross compilation
capabilities if i am right.
I know of squeak since some years and actually tried it out some years
ago and I was very surprised when I looked at the new version. It seems
to have gone a far way.

On my trials I found out, that values of large postive integer don't
equal values of integer even if the values represent the same value.
Is this behaviour intended?

For example:

(5883377743366005002288555544466433777 \\\ 2) = 
(5883377743366005002288555544466433777 \\ 2)

results in false, although both expression answer 1, but the first
expression answers a large postive int(1) and the last a int(1).

I just wanted to to do some performance comparisons between VA and
Squeak and recognized that \\\ performs faster than \\ but I was not
sure if it does what i intended, so I implemented a loop comparing the
results of this two operations.

I wanted to change this behaviour myself, but I recognized that = uses a
primitive implementation and if you want to change that behaviour you
might want to do it there?!

I am thinking abotu implementing an Interface to GMP (Linux), could you give me some advice about where to search for documentation on how to do that?

Thank you in advance

Juergen