Re: [Caml-list] truncated division, remainder and arithmetics

[peio <peio.borthelle@gmail.com>]

> All contemporary microprocessors that implement division in hardware
> implement what you call truncated division.  The other forms of
> division and modulus (there are at least two others) can be
> implemented on top of that.  See this excellent summary:
> 
> Daan Leijen, Division and Modulus for Computer Scientists , July
> 2003.
> http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=151917

Indeed I missed the fact of the processor available instructions.
Thanks for the clarification and for the reference. Interestingly
Leijen writes about optimisations possible with the euclidean division
which could maybe lead to easier hardware implementation, but this
surely is such a small simplification that instruction sets are
sticking to the truncated one due to inertia of backward-
compatibility..

> If you are doing computation with big numbers perhaps you can take a
> look at zarith, which define 
> many of the different division convention

I didn't knew about zarith and it seems interesting even if this is an
overkill for me.


cheers,
peio