perl-Math-GMP

High speed arbitrary size integer math

Math::GMP was designed to be a drop-in replacement both for Math::BigInt and for regular integer arithmetic. Unlike BigInt, though, Math::GMP uses the GNU gmp library for all of its calculations, as opposed to straight Perl functions. This can result in speed improvements. The downside is that this module requires a C compiler to install -- a small tradeoff in most cases. Also, this module is not 100% compatible with Math::BigInt. A Math::GMP object can be used just as a normal numeric scalar would be -- the module overloads most of the normal arithmetic operators to provide as seamless an interface as possible. However, if you need a perfect interface, you can do the following: use Math::GMP qw(:constant); $n = 2 ** (256 * 1024); print "n is $n\n"; This would fail without the ':constant' since Perl would use normal doubles to compute the 250,000 bit number, and thereby overflow it into meaninglessness (smaller exponents yield less accurate data due to floating point rounding).