The Fundamental Operations

The fundamental building blocks of any software package for computer arithmetic are the functions that carry out the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The efficiency of the entire package hangs on the last two of these, and for that reason great care must be taken in the selection and implementation of the associated algorithms. Fortunately, volume 2 of Donald Knuth’s classic The Art of Computer Programming contains most of what we need for this portion of the FLINT/C functions.