22 Jun
2005
22 Jun
'05
3:55 a.m.
On Jun 21, 2005, at 7:43 PM, Don McLane wrote:
Everyone's done a great job on Squeak, I'm not criticizing. But this stuff about needing to 'normalize' a Large...Integer before comparing seems dangerous. It appears as though integers can be magically coerced into LargeIntegers (which is nice), but if you don't expect it, it can be quite surprising. Surprises should be minimized.
Quite correct, Don. This should be considered a bug. If you change #raisedTo:modulo: to use #\ instead of #\, it'll return a properly normalized integer, and your comparison will work correctly.
Judging by the comment in LargePositiveInteger>>\, it looks like a non-normalizing optimized version for use in cryptographic number crunching.
Colin