Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.
As a general rule, if you want to check if a number is prime, it turns out that the deterministic solutions are rather slow. In fact, they tend to be too slow for general use. So I figured, while writing Number::Properties that is_prime() should use the Miller-Rabin primality tests. My code had some issues, but I suspect this had something to do with Perl's lack of precision. As a result, and since Perl is a bit slow for work like this, I figured I would write the code in XS. I used the C from Top Coder's primality testing article, but quickly got stuck with the following error:
Error: 'long long' not in typemap in Properties.xs, line 64
Please specify prototyping behavior for Properties.xs (see perlxs manual)
Much googling suggests to me that there's not a simple way around this that's also robust. Damn. I may have to switch back to Perl.
That implies... (Score:2)
...that you're trying to move a long long between C and Perl. Do you need to do that? Can't the long longs just live inside the C?
It's probably not too hard to write the code to thunk between long long and Math::BigInt - would that help?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know since my C and XS skills are so poor. The relevant bit of XS code is this:
Re: (Score:2)
If you're prepared to limit the input to 32 bit integers you can probably just change the
long longtolongin the prototype of Miller(). It should still uselong longinternally.To be more strictly correct you could use the output of
as the type of that argument. That will be
longfor 32 bit Perl andlong longfor 64 bit Perl.And if you want to be really sneaky write a version that bypasses XS type mapping and correctly handles Math::BigInt objects :)
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Or, am I missing a point?
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No, I think you're quite right :)
This little program:
prints 53.
So Ovid - make that argument a double and then cast it to a long long inside the function.
Re: (Score:1)
Then your XS looks like:
and the Miller function becomes
Caveat: obviously, if you put something other than a number in p_as_str, things will go awry. Also, different platforms (e.
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The Updated AKS primality test is slow? (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test [wikipedia.org]
The key significance of AKS is that it was the first published primality-proving algorithm to be simultaneously general, polynomial, deterministic, and unconditional. Previous algorithms have achieved any three of these properties, but not all four.
I haven't seen an implementation (in perl or otherwise), but I thought it put to bed the problem of determining if a number was prime or not. The real problem is factorizing a composite
Fast primality testing with Pari (Score:1)
If you're after a fast way of checking for prime numbers from Perl, then it's hard to go past PARI/GP [u-bordeaux.fr], which has a Math::Pari [cpan.org] interface. With the generation of large primes, strong random numbers, support for integers up to (2^29)^29 out of the box, and a host of other math functions, Pari is essentially crack for number theorists. It provides both isprime() [u-bordeaux.fr] and ispseudoprime() [wikipedia.org] functions.
There's also a brief mention of using Math::Pari for primality testing on perlmonks [perlmonks.org].
Cheerio,
Paul