Re: Fun-O Basic Edition Compiler

[Andreas Bogk <address@hidden>]

Jeffrey Siegal <jbs@quiotix.com> writes:

> I agree with all of the above, except that I'm not sure it should be
> the operators that wrap.  A nonstandard type such as
> <machine-integer> could also be used.

There's also code that assumes a certain basic type forms a finite
field of a certain size when wrapping.  This is often the case for
crypto code: AES uses operations on GF(2^8), which happens to be
representable as an eight-bit two's complement number that ignores
overflows ("char" in C).  IDEA does multiplications on GF(2^16 + 1),
and implementations use GF(2^16) aka "short" for the implementation.

It would be nice if the language provided a way to work with arbitrary
finite fields, which happen to have fast implementations for special
cases.

Andreas

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