ANN: mxNumber -- Experimental Number Types, Version 0.2.0

[Tim Peters]

[Brian Kelley]
> I have taken the opportunity to expose a couple of Integer methods
>
> Integer.popcount() - number of bits set
> Integer.setbit(bit) - set the bit indicated by bit
> Integer.clrbit(bit) - set the bit indicated by bit
>
> These are very useful for Aritificial Intelligence/feature vector
> algorithms.  Is there any other desire to see these types of functions
> exposed?

Yes, provided they're carefully defined.  For example, what's the popcount
of -1?  If you're viewing Integers as using 2's-comp notation (as Python
does), there's no obvious answer to that (-1 is an "infinite string" of 1
bits), which makes it *especially* important to define what it does.  All
previous attempts to define these kinds of things floundered to death in an
ocean of competing silly arguments.

> ...
> The other question I have is about pickling:  I noticed that the
> pickled structures use a string to determine the "long"
> representation.  This is somewhat wasteful for storage considerations.
> Is there any chance for a compressed version of the long
> representation?

Pickles are supposed to be platform- and release-independent, so you can't
change what the existing long format code does.  Note that it's "a feature"
of text-mode pickles that they're composed of printable ASCII, too.  It's
possible that you may be able to add a new format code to binary pickles.