dwayne / elm-natural Goto Github PK

The library currently has a few functions for converting to strings in different bases. It would be nice to have a more general function for converting to a List Int in an arbitrary base (up to 2^26).

My specific use case is converting a Natural to Bytes (in a compact way) and back again, so:

• It'd be nice if 2^n bases could be optimised using bit shifts instead of divisions.
• I only need one specific base (256), but it'd be nice to have a general function to do it for all bases.
• Specific functions for working directly with Bytes would be nice, but probably not worth the extra dependency.

Proposed functions

{-| Create the natural number that represents the given list of base-`b` digits.
-}
fromBase : Int -> List Int -> Natural
fromBase b digits =
    Debug.todo ""


{-| Convert the given natural number to a list of digits in base-`b`.
-}
toBase : Int -> Natural -> List Int
toBase b n =
    Debug.todo ""

These could perhaps be named toBaseBDigits and fromBaseBDigits for better consistency with the string functions.

Hi, I'm dealing with big integers and your package seems to fit well with some of my needs for handling unbounded integers with exact computations, instead of approximate for anything > 2^53.

Another common use-case I have is dealing with big integers in JSON files I may receive or send. JSON has no issue with big integers (contrary to JS) so it's common in tools I interact with to have integers > 2^53 in JSON, that are encoded as integers, and not as strings. I was wondering if you encountered similar use cases, and your general thoughts about JSON interop for elm-natural.