[Toybox] bc, etc.

Isaac Dunham idunham at lavabit.com
Wed Apr 3 20:38:28 PDT 2013


Hello,
After seeing that the "ifconfig" storm was because someone had implemented it I read the development log again, and this email is in response to a couple things on there.

First, regarding bc:
https://github.com/libtom/libtomfloat/blob/master/mpf_pow.c
might be useful if and when you go for arbitrary precision exponents (implementing "raised to the power of .3176252" ).
In fact, I wonder if bc is best handled as a essentially a wrapper around libtomfloat.
(FYI, libtom{crypt,math,float} are all essentially public domain.)

But, I'd be inclined to put bc on a back burner, and temporarily keep the C replacement with a "TODO: drop this and implement bc" note.

Second, on the whole question of cleaning up stuff...
These are only my own thoughts, and as such far less relevant to your project than your own thoughts! 
If it looks good but you can squeeze a kilobyte or so off, I'd think of the kilobyte as lower priority (ie, "can improve this later, but it's suitable").  If it's 2-3kb that you can squeeze out, putting it in pending is justifible. If it's 5-10kb bloated, it may be more useful as a sample implementation (ie: pending/, but...it might need a full rewrite).  But those are rough approximations that vary with effort, projects remaining, and size of the toy.

In other words, by the comments you made about uu{en,de}code and this rule, I would be putting uuencode in posix/ with minimal changes and uudecode might take a bit more time.
But please don't take that as me recommending a course of action, I'm just mentioning my thoughts in case you find something useful there. ;)
-- 
Isaac Dunham <idunham at lavabit.com>


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