Re: factor inconsistencies/limits?

[Jim Meyering]

"James Youngman" <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 8:04 PM, James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> I have a working GMP-based version (essentially, it's the example
>> taken from the GMP docs that you mentioned earlier).  For the moment,
>> the code always uses GMP if it's available.  The GMP version is
>> dramatically faster for the pathalogical case mentioned in the docs,
>> and about 2x slower for "easy" cases with small integers.
>
> It turns out that it needs a little more work, since it does not
> currently produce the factors in ascending order.    I guess we
> probably can't spuriously change that behaviour.
>
> Options:
> 1. Sort the factors before printing them

This sounds fine to me.

> 2. Bluster that we can break the rules for N>2^64, since that never
> worked before anyway
> 3. Stare hard at the code to find a way to efficiently do the
> factorisation and emit the factors in numerical order
>
> James.