I'm making a toy lisp interpreter with D and I don't know the theory of Lisp very well.
I was wondering if Lisp can implement basic arithmetic functions (+, -, ×, ÷) by itself.
Most Lisp/Scheme dialects implemented it with the builtins of C, Java-like language and overload it as lisp code(duplicated implements?).
I want to write arithmetic functions to Lisp code purely.
Is it possible?
Unless you want to use Church numerals or the like, at some point you're going to have to get into the hardware arithmetic instructions (add, sub, mul, div) one way or another.
If going down the hardware instructions route, then depending on your Lisp implementation, it may be implemented using C code (especially for an interpreter-based implementation), or those instructions may be emitted directly (for a JIT compiler-based implementation).
If you're trying to be as first-principles as possible, you can implement multiplication and division using addition and subtraction instructions (in a pinch, you can implement them the same way you were taught to in school, though you're using word-sized digits—that is, for a 32-bit machine, each digit is base-4294967296 instead of base-10).
The very simple solution would always to use your host numeric tower, but I understand your desire to keep the primitives low. The result however is a language like the first LISPs which had a bad rep about performance.
As an alternative to Chris's Church numerals you can model numbers using lists. Eg. 1234 can be (+ 4 3 2 1). Now you either have a low numeric type as primitive or the digits you see are simply self evaluating symbols which your math functions know what are. If you have a low numeric type you can add a exponent so it becomes (+ 0 4 3 2 1) for 1234 and (+ 1 4 3 2 1) for 12340 and (+ -11 4 3 2 1) for 0.00000001234. All arithmetic would be list iterations using exactly the math you know from school. It's more effective than Church numerals and slightly more efficient and it's easier to print it and read it.
I have used this on my little lisp interpreter that only have lists and symbols.
If you are interested in implementing bignums in Lisp I can recommend this series by André van Meulebrouck:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101208222557/http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.08/08.03/BigNums/index.html
The link above is the web.archive.org. For some reason the original link while still live shows no contents ( http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/vol.08/08.03/bignums/index.html )
All of Peano arithmetic is based on three functions:
zero, represented in Lisps as zerop or zero? depending on dialect;
successor, represented in Lisps by add1; if your dialect doesn't have it you're going to have to implement + in your bootstrap language anyway;
identity, represented in Lisp by equal.
With those three functions you can build the whole of arithmetic, but it is not going to be easy!
In my opinion you would be wise to build your Lisp arithmetic primitives (add, subtract, multiply, divide) in your implementation language. This is particularly so if you want to have first class ratios and bignums.
Related
I am trying to write a program for finding Mersenne prime numbers. Using the unsigned long long type I was able to determine the value of the 9th Mersenne prime, which is (2^61)-1. For larger values I would need a data type that could store integer values greater than 2^64.
I should be able to use operators like *, *=, > ,< and % with this data type.
You can not do what you want with C natives types, however there are libraries that let handle arbitrarily large numbers, like the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library.
To store large numbers, there are many choices, which are given below in order of decreasing preferences:
1) Use third-party libraries developed by others on github, codeflex etc for your mentioned language, that is, C.
2) Switch to other languages like Python which has in-built large number processing capabilities, Java, which supports BigNum, or C++.
3) Develop your own data structures, may be in terms of strings (where 100 char length could refer to 100 decimal digits) with its custom operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication etc, just like complex number library in C++ were developed in this way. This choice could be meant for your research and educational purpose.
What all these people are basically saying is that the 64bit CPU will not be capable of adding those huge numbers with just an instruction but you rather need an algorithm that will be able to add those numbers. Such an algorithm would have to treat the 2 numbers in pieces.
And the libraries they listed will allow you to do that, a good exercise would be to develop one yourself (just the algorithm/function to learn how it's done).
There is no standard way for having data type greater than 64 bits. You should check the documentation of your systems, some of them define 128 bits integers. However, to really have flexible size integers, you should use an other representation, using an array for instance. Then, it's up to you to define the operators =, <, >, etc.
Fortunately, libraries such as GMP permits you to use arbitrary length integers.
Take a look at the GNU MP Bignum Library.
Use double :)
it will solve your problem!
I wrote an Ansi C compiler for a friend's custom 16-bit stack-based CPU several years ago but I never got around to implementing all the data types. Now I would like to finish the job so I'm wondering if there are any math libraries out there that I can use to fill the gaps. I can handle 16-bit integer data types since they are native to the CPU and therefore I have all the math routines (ie. +, -, *, /, %) done for them. However, since his CPU does not handle floating point then I have to implement floats/doubles myself. I also have to implement the 8-bit and 32-bit data types (bother integer and floats/doubles). I'm pretty sure this has been done and redone many times and since I'm not particularly looking forward to recreating the wheel I would appreciate it if someone would point me at a library that can help me out.
Now I was looking at GMP but it seems to be overkill (library must be absolutely huge, not sure my custom compiler would be able to handle it) and it takes numbers in the form of strings which would be wasteful for obvious reasons. For example :
mpz_set_str(x, "7612058254738945", 10);
mpz_set_str(y, "9263591128439081", 10);
mpz_mul(result, x, y);
This seems simple enough, I like the api... but I would rather pass in an array rather than a string. For example, if I wanted to multiply two 32-bit longs together I would like to be able to pass it two arrays of size two where each array contains two 16-bit values that actually represent a 32-bit long and have the library place the output into an output array. If I needed floating point then I should be able to specify the precision as well.
This may seem like asking for too much but I'm asking in the hopes that someone has seen something like this.
Many thanks in advance!
Let's divide the answer.
8-bit arithmetic
This one is very easy. In fact, C already talks about this under the term "integer promotion". This means that if you have 8-bit data and you want to do an operation on them, you simply pad them with zero (or one if signed and negative) to make them 16-bit. Then you proceed with the normal 16-bit operation.
32-bit arithmetic
Note: so long as the standard is concerned, you don't really need to have 32-bit integers.
This could be a bit tricky, but it is still not worth using a library for. For each operation, you would need to take a look at how you learned to do them in elementary school in base 10, and then do the same in base 216 for 2 digit numbers (each digit being one 16-bit integer). Once you understand the analogy with simple base 10 math (and hence the algorithms), you would need to implement them in assembly of your CPU.
This basically means loading the most significant 16 bit on one register, and the least significant in another register. Then follow the algorithm for each operation and perform it. You would most likely need to get help from overflow and other flags.
Floating point arithmetic
Note: so long as the standard is concerned, you don't really need to conform to IEEE 754.
There are various libraries already written for software emulated floating points. You may find this gcc wiki page interesting:
GNU libc has a third implementation, soft-fp. (Variants of this are also used for Linux kernel math emulation on some targets.) soft-fp is used in glibc on PowerPC --without-fp to provide the same soft-float functions as in libgcc. It is also used on Alpha, SPARC and PowerPC to provide some ABI-specified floating-point functions (which in turn may get used by GCC); on PowerPC these are IEEE quad functions, not IBM long double ones.
Performance measurements with EEMBC indicate that soft-fp (as speeded up somewhat using ideas from ieeelib) is about 10-15% faster than fp-bit and ieeelib about 1% faster than soft-fp, testing on IBM PowerPC 405 and 440. These are geometric mean measurements across EEMBC; some tests are several times faster with soft-fp than with fp-bit if they make heavy use of floating point, while others don't make significant use of floating point. Depending on the particular test, either soft-fp or ieeelib may be faster; for example, soft-fp is somewhat faster on Whetstone.
One answer could be to take a look at the source code for glibc and see if you could salvage what you need.
I am trying to write a program for finding Mersenne prime numbers. Using the unsigned long long type I was able to determine the value of the 9th Mersenne prime, which is (2^61)-1. For larger values I would need a data type that could store integer values greater than 2^64.
I should be able to use operators like *, *=, > ,< and % with this data type.
You can not do what you want with C natives types, however there are libraries that let handle arbitrarily large numbers, like the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library.
To store large numbers, there are many choices, which are given below in order of decreasing preferences:
1) Use third-party libraries developed by others on github, codeflex etc for your mentioned language, that is, C.
2) Switch to other languages like Python which has in-built large number processing capabilities, Java, which supports BigNum, or C++.
3) Develop your own data structures, may be in terms of strings (where 100 char length could refer to 100 decimal digits) with its custom operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication etc, just like complex number library in C++ were developed in this way. This choice could be meant for your research and educational purpose.
What all these people are basically saying is that the 64bit CPU will not be capable of adding those huge numbers with just an instruction but you rather need an algorithm that will be able to add those numbers. Such an algorithm would have to treat the 2 numbers in pieces.
And the libraries they listed will allow you to do that, a good exercise would be to develop one yourself (just the algorithm/function to learn how it's done).
There is no standard way for having data type greater than 64 bits. You should check the documentation of your systems, some of them define 128 bits integers. However, to really have flexible size integers, you should use an other representation, using an array for instance. Then, it's up to you to define the operators =, <, >, etc.
Fortunately, libraries such as GMP permits you to use arbitrary length integers.
Take a look at the GNU MP Bignum Library.
Use double :)
it will solve your problem!
Wikipedia, the one true source of knowledge, states:
On most older microprocessors, bitwise
operations are slightly faster than
addition and subtraction operations
and usually significantly faster than
multiplication and division
operations. On modern architectures,
this is not the case: bitwise
operations are generally the same
speed as addition (though still faster
than multiplication).
Is there a practical reason to learn bitwise operation hacks or it is now just something you learn for theory and curiosity?
Bitwise operations are worth studying because they have many applications. It is not their main use to substitute arithmetic operations. Cryptography, computer graphics, hash functions, compression algorithms, and network protocols are just some examples where bitwise operations are extremely useful.
The lines you quoted from the Wikipedia article just tried to give some clues about the speed of bitwise operations. Unfortunately the article fails to provide some good examples of applications.
Bitwise operations are still useful. For instance, they can be used to create "flags" using a single variable, and save on the number of variables you would use to indicate various conditions. Concerning performance on arithmetic operations, it is better to leave the compiler do the optimization (unless you are some sort of guru).
They're useful for getting to understand how binary "works"; otherwise, no. In fact, I'd say that even if the bitwise hacks are faster on a given architecture, it's the compiler's job to make use of that fact — not yours. Write what you mean.
The only case where it makes sense to use them is if you're actually using your numbers as bitvectors. For instance, if you're modeling some sort of hardware and the variables represent registers.
If you want to perform arithmetic, use the arithmetic operators.
Depends what your problem is. If you are controlling hardware you need ways to set single bits within an integer.
Buy an OGD1 PCI board (open graphics card) and talk to it using libpci. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project
It is true that in most cases when you multiply an integer by a constant that happens to be a power of two, the compiler optimises it to use the bit-shift. However, when the shift is also a variable, the compiler cannot deduct it, unless you explicitly use the shift operation.
Funny nobody saw fit to mention the ctype[] array in C/C++ - also implemented in Java. This concept is extremely useful in language processing, especially when using different alphabets, or when parsing a sentence.
ctype[] is an array of 256 short integers, and in each integer, there are bits representing different character types. For example, ctype[;A'] - ctype['Z'] have bits set to show they are upper-case letters of the alphabet; ctype['0']-ctype['9'] have bits set to show they are numeric. To see if a character x is alphanumeric, you can write something like 'if (ctype[x] & (UC | LC | NUM))' which is somewhat faster and much more elegant than writing 'if ('A' = x <= 'Z' || ....'.
Once you start thinking bitwise, you find lots of places to use it. For instance, I had two text buffers. I wrote one to the other, replacing all occurrences of FINDstring with REPLACEstring as I went. Then for the next find-replace pair, I simply switched the buffer indices, so I was always writing from buffer[in] to buffer[out]. 'in' started as 0, 'out' as 1. After completing a copy I simply wrote 'in ^= 1; out ^= 1;'. And after handling all the replacements I just wrote buffer[out] to disk, not needing to know what 'out' was at that time.
If you think this is low-level, consider that certain mental errors such as deja-vu and its twin jamais-vu are caused by cerebral bit errors!
Working with IPv4 addresses frequently requires bit-operations to discover if a peer's address is within a routable network or must be forwarded onto a gateway, or if the peer is part of a network allowed or denied by firewall rules. Bit operations are required to discover the broadcast address of a network.
Working with IPv6 addresses requires the same fundamental bit-level operations, but because they are so long, I'm not sure how they are implemented. I'd wager money that they are still implemented using the bit operators on pieces of the data, sized appropriately for the architecture.
Of course (to me) the answer is yes: there can be practical reasons to learn them. The fact that nowadays, e.g., an add instruction on typical processors is as fast as an or/xor or an and just means that: an add is as fast as, say, an or on those processors.
The improvements in speed of instructions like add, divide, and so on, just means that now on those processors you can use them and being less worried about performance impact; but it is true now as in the past that you usually won't change every adds to bitwise operations to implement an add. That is, in some cases it may depend on which hacks: likely some hack now must be considered educational and not practical anymore; others could have still their practical application.
i am building a compiler similar to c , but i want it to parse integers bigger than 2^32 . hows it possible?how has been big integers been implemented in python and ruby like languages ..!!
There are libraries to do this sort of thing.
Check out gmplib.
There are lots of big number libraries, see this wikipedia article for a complete list.
GMP(GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library) is sufficient for everything I have encountered. NTL is more of the same but is object orientated.
Generally these libraries represent the numbers with arrays with each digit of a number as a character if you want to roll your own but it is a lot of work.
If you want to write it yourself, follow my trip through memory lane ;-).
In the old days, when computers used 8 bits. We often needed to calculate with big numbers (like > 255). And we all had to write the routines. For example the addition.
If we needed to add numbers of two bytes to each other we used the following algorithm:
Add the least significant bytes.
If the result exceeded 8 bits, the carry bit was set.
Add the most significant bytes and the carry flag (if set).
If the result exceeded 8 bits you produced an overflow error (but you don't need to do this if you want more that 2 bytes.
You can extend this to more bytes/words/dwords/qwords and to other operators.
I believe you'll need some sort of bigint library, which are available on the net, just do a bit of searching and you may find one that's suitable for your project.
Because, simply parsing the integers, I believe, will not be enough. Your users will want not only to store, but also, probably, perform operation with such numbers.
There is a slide by Felix von Leitner that covers some bignum basics. Personally i think it is quite informative and technical.
C++ Big Integer Library from Matt McCutchen
https://mattmccutchen.net/bigint/
C++ source code only. Very simple to use.
You would have to use some sort of struct in c to achieve this. You will find this is difficult if you are on and x86 platform and not x64 as well. If you're on x86, prepare to get very familiar with assembly and the carry flag.
Good luck!