The MP library interface for SWI-Prolog, version 1.3
====================================================

This package contains the SWI-Prolog interface to the GMP library (GNU Multiple
Precision arithmetic library). GMP allows for arbitrary size integers, arbitrary
precision floats, and rational number arithmetic. In addition, this package
includes complex arithmetic added to GMP. Whenever you run into number
representation problems in SWI-Prolog, you can use this package. MP integers
are very useful as arbitrary sized bitvectors too!

To install MP, first install the GMP 3.0.1 library available from

http://www.swox.com/gmp/

Then, configure the package using ./configure.  If the GMP library is
at a different location, add --with-gmp-include= and  --with-gmp-lib=
options to ./configure (see configure --help).

Now run `make' to build the library or `make plmp' to build a new
SWI-Prolog with MP built-in.  `make install' installs the mp.pl and
mp.so libraries in the default SWI-Prolog.

`make' may not succeed in building the library, depending on your system.
In that case, use `make plmp' to create a new Prolog executable with MP.

The file mpdemo.pl contains a short demo. You can test the library
by loading this file and typing ?- mp_demo.

The arithmetic primitives related to MP are implemented in mp.c and brief
descriptions of the primitives are provided in this file.

The file mp.pl contains additional arithmetic predicates, including
mp_is/2 that implements is/2 with MP arithmetic. See mp_is/2 in mp.pl for a
description of the syntax of expressions and the types of operators and
functions. Big integers and floats can be specified as atoms or strings, e.g.
"1234567890987654321". For strings to work, you need to set style_check(+string)
first.

The mp.tar contains:

.plrc		Set paths for local testing
Makefile.in	Makefile template
README		This file
acconfig.h	autoconf spec file
config.h.in	config.h template generated by autoheader
configure*	configure script generated by autoconf
configure.in	autoconf spec file
install-sh*	fall-back install program
main.c		the new SWI-Prolog main
mp.c		the MP implementation
mp.pl		additional MP module
mpdemo.pl	short demo
pl-mp.h		the MP header file

================================================================================
Copyright (c) 1999 Robert A. van Engelen, Florida State University
engelen@cs.fsu.edu. All rights reserved.
Thanks to Jan Wielemaker for the installation and configuration files
================================================================================
