As it stands, there is, as far as I can tell, no modulo or remainder operator for the Decimal type. This seems incongruous with expectations from using floats, float80, double, etc.
It's fairly easy to add with something like:
extension Decimal {
func mod(_ b: Decimal) -> Decimal {
var d = self/(b)
var f : Decimal = 0
NSDecimalRound(&f, &d, 0, .down)
return self-(b*(f))
}
}
(that was just a rough little thing I did for a quick Playground)
but it seems like a weird omission. I would've expected something akin to Double's .remainder to exist. Is there any reason for not having such a method for Decimal?
Also, correct me if I'm wrong here, but Decimal is not arbitrary precision, right? Been looking around online and couldn't find documentation that stated it clearly, but a quick look at the CoreLibs source and it certainly looked like it was fixed precision; This should perhaps have a separate thread, but are we not missing an arbitrary precision data type like BigInt and BigDecimal in the core libraries?
They’re straightforward to implement, but the API of Foundation is owned by Apple and adding any methods requires going through a review process. I’ve implemented remainder and truncatingRemainder but they can’t be shipped without that review, and I don’t have time to sort that out.
Correct, this type does not have arbitrary precision. It is also not an IEEE-compliant decimal floating-point type, as it can’t represent infinity. Swift Numerics will eventually add a BigInt type; maybe also a BigDecimal type too.
I see. And CoreFoundation is not really meant to deviate from Foundation I'm guessing. - I've read all the posts and such I could find on contributing to Swift and CoreLibs but I'm still very new here, is there any way I can help with the review process and perhaps assist in getting it into Foundation or is the review process you mention strictly between an Apple maintainer and a PR or?
Having BigInt and perhaps BigDecimal in Swift Numerics would be great. Writing a bit of Go these days, and the "big" package for that is pretty nice. Found a nice GitHub project for BigInteger in Swift, but a neat solution basically accessible everywhere without pulling in an outside dependency would be great.
Been doing some implementation of some crypto for uni; Of course I wouldn't roll my own crypto in practice, but for university purposes I need to, and even if it's not the language we're handing in our assignments in, I like to do quick testing of ideas with Swift because it's so fast to work with and I'm very familiar with it, but for large RSA exponentiations I found myself longing for arbitrary size types
In any case thank you very much for your great reply - I appreciate it a lot :)