IMath
=====

Arbitrary precision integer and rational arithmetic library.

IMath is an open-source ANSI C arbitrary precision integer and rational
arithmetic library.

IMath is copyright &copy; 2002-2009 Michael J. Fromberger.

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About IMath
-----------

IMath is a library written in portable ANSI C that allows you to perform
arithmetic on integers and rational numbers of arbitrary precision.  While many
programming languages, including Java, Perl, and Python provide arbitrary
precision numbers as a standard library or language feature, C does not.

IMath was designed to be small, self-contained, easy to understand and use, and
as portable as possible across various platforms.  The API is simple, and the
code should be comparatively easy to modify or extend.  Simplicity and
portability are useful goals for some applications&#8212;however, IMath does
not attempt to break performance records.  If you need the fastest possible
implementation, you might consider some other libraries, such as GNU MP (GMP),
MIRACL, or the bignum library from OpenSSL.

Programming with IMath
----------------------

Detailed descriptions of the IMath API can be found in `doc.txt`.  However, the
following is a brief synopsis of how to get started with some simple tasks.

To do basic integer arithmetic, you must declare variables of type `mpz_t` in
your program, and call the functions defined in `imath.h` to operate on them.
Here is a simple example that reads one base-10 integer from the command line,
multiplies it by another (fixed) value, and prints the result to the standard
output in base-10 notation:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include "imath.h"

    int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {
      mpz_t  a, b;
      char  *buf;
      int    len;

      if(argc < 2) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Usage: testprogram <integer>\n");
        return 1;
      }

      /* Initialize a new zero-valued mpz_t structure */
      mp_int_init(&a);

      /* Initialize a new mpz_t with a small integer value */
      mp_int_init_value(&b, 25101);

      /* Read a string value in the specified radix */
      mp_int_read_string(&a, 10, argv[1]);

      /* Multiply the two together... */
      mp_int_mul(&a, &b, &a);

      /* Print out the result */
      len = mp_int_string_len(&a, 10);
      buf = calloc(len, sizeof(*buf));
      mp_int_to_string(&a, 10, buf, len);
      printf("result = %s\n", buf);
      free(buf);

      /* Release memory occupied by mpz_t structures when finished */
      mp_int_clear(&b);
      mp_int_clear(&a);

      return 0;
    }

This simple example program does not do any error checking, but all the IMath
API functions return an `mp_result` value which can be used to detect various
problems like range errors, running out of memory, and undefined results.

The IMath API also supports operations on arbitrary precision rational numbers.
The functions for creating and manipulating rational values (type `mpq_t`) are
defined in `imrat.h`, so that you need only include them in your project if you
wish to.
