[Python-ideas] Add the imath module

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:52:38AM -0500, Tim Peters wrote:

> Steven's numbers are pretty baffling to me, since these are all composite
> and so iterating Miller-Rabin "should get out" pretty fast:

That's because you haven't seen my code :-)

It's over-engineered, class-based, and written as a learning exercise. 
There's a compatibility layer so it will work back to Python 2.4 and an 
instrumentation layer which I inserted in a fit of enthusiasm to gather 
staticistics, which I have never once looked at since.

And *even so* it is still fast enough for casual use at the interactive 
interpreter, compared to more naive algorithms with worse Big O 
performance characteristics.

You might think 5 seconds is slow, but I'm serious when I say some of 
the other algorithms I played with would take *days* to generate, 
or check, largish primes.


-- 
Steve