Re: ADA arithmetic

[slinky.cs.nyu.edu!slinky.cs.nyu.edu!nobody@nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Of course Simon's suggestion of how to program multi-precision numbers in
Ada is reasonable as a crude approach for beginning students, but is
ludicrously inefficient. Probably it is likely that a well written routine
(I believe brother Eachus is hard at work on a portable efficient 64-bit
integer package) will be an order of magnitude faster.

Of course in assembler one can do much better. This is one of the very few
times that assembler is not only more efficient but much easier to program
than typical high level languages like Ada. Why: because these languages
don't give access to the crucial primitives such as unsigned add with a
carry indication.