Bignum v1.0 - a [critcl] tcl wrapper to libgmp 

   WHAT:   provides these packages:
   * bigint - which provides wrappers for arbitrary precision integers
   * bigfloat - which provides wrappers for arbitrary precision floats
   * bignum - both bigint and bigfloat

   WHERE:   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=18733
   DEPENDENCIES:   This works with libgmp3 4.1.1 or similar under Linux; get it from any gnu archive (if you haven't got it). To recompile it, you'll need the latest version of [critcl]; http://mini.net/sdarchive/ is where you'll find it.
   INSTALL:   unpack this in /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, or wherever your tcl resides.
   AUTHOR:   [Colin McCormack]
   LICENSE:   It's licensed under GPL - of necessity, as libgmp is.

SEE ALSO:  [http://wiki.hping.org/108] [SS]'s [bignum in pure Tcl]
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I've modified bignum to use the latest Critcl and built a cross-platform library Starkit with binaries for Linux, Windows and OSX [http://mini.net/sdarchive/bignum.kit]

To use, either unpack the Starkit and copy the contents of the lib directory into somewere on your auto_path, or just source it directly

   tclkit
   % source bignum.kit
   % package require bignum
   % bigint::add 1111111111111111111111111111 2222222222222222222222222222
   3333333333333333333333333333

The binaries on Windows and Linux are statically linked against libgmp (and therefore self-contained) but I couldn't get this working on OSX so you'll need to have gmp installed on your LDPATH to use bignum on OSX. I'll have another go later.

The modified source is available at [http://www.digitalsmarties.com/pub/bignum.tar.gz]

[stevel] 27 Jan 05

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[LES] on July 27 2005: using bignum.kit from [sdarchive] with [ActiveTcl] 8.5 on Windows 98, I ran this command...

 $ ::bigint::powm 5 6 0

...and Tcl crashed (pure DOS or Tkcon). It only seems to happen with the 0, but it does happen every time. Maybe I shouldn't be using 0, I admit I do not understand what that function really does (I wanted to calculate a large number raised to a large power). But I don't think that [Tcl] or [bignum] should crash on me just because I threw a zero at it.  :-)

[Lars H]: '''powm''' is probably "power modulo" (a very common
operation in many cryptographical algorithms), so a zero as 
last argument is likely to lead to "divide by zero" conditions.
This could either be a bug in libgmp, or a failure of the wrapper 
to catch input not supported by that library, but come Tcl 8.5 
we'll most likely have equivalent functionality in the core anyway 
(happy, happy; joy, joy).



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This
[http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=10102/ur0610g/ur0610g.htm]
is a review of a book called '''BigNum Math'''.

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[Category Package] |
[Category Mathematics]