Newbie questions

[Sven-Olof Nystr|m]

Richard A. O'Keefe writes:
 > Nick Linker <xlcr@REDACTED> wrote:
 > 	I'm sorry, but I meant quite different question:  given a big
 > 	number N, how to compute the number of digits?
 > 	
 > 	There is obvious solution:  length(integer_to_list(N)), but it
 > 	is not very efficient.  I wanted to have a bit faster
 > 	solution... Ok, nevermind.
 > 	
 > I'm aware of (and have used) several programming languages providing
 > as-long-as-necessary integer arithmetic.  Without consulting manuals
 > (everything is being moved out of my office so that new carpet can
 > be laid) it's hard to be sure, but from memory, NONE of them provides
 > an operation "how many decimal digits in this bignum".  Common Lisp
 > has HAULONG, which tells you about how many BITS, and Java's
 > BigInteger class offers bitLength(), which again tells you how many
 > BITS.  In Smalltalk, the obvious thing to do would be n printString size,
 > and in Scheme it would be (string-length (number->string n)).


You seem to have your Lisps confused :-). Haulong is a function in
MacLisp; the corresponding operation in Common Lisp is
integer-length. Both functions give the length of the integer in bits.

 > It's not completely clear what you want.  Is the "number of digits"
 > in -123456890123456890 twenty (literally the number of digits) or
 > twenty-one (the number of characters in the minimal decimal representation)?

Curiously, both CL's integer-length and Java's bitLength() define the
length of negative numbers so that -1 has length 0 (same as the length
of 0, of course).


Sven-Olof