Dev Notes: 2017_05_04

Simplifying Things

Up to this point the c8::natural class has been a little different to the integer and rational classes. Unlike the other two it has supported c8::natural and c8::natural_digit operands. The thinking was that the c8::natural_digit versions would be significantly quicker than the c8::natural variants.

While this approach might have been correct early on in the development cycle, it hasn't actually been correct for some time. The generic versions now handle special cases efficiently, and the overheads associated with natural number construction have been dramatically reduced. Removing the c8::natural_digit operations gives us a design that's much cleaner because it avoids leaking something that was really intended to be in an internal implementation detail. The result is much easier to understand and use.

See Also

• Dev Notes: 2017_05_01