R: News for R Package 'flint'

NEWS	R Documentation

News for R Package flint

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2025-02-20)

Installation

An array declaration in ‘src/flint.h’ specified an incorrect (too small) array size, triggering gcc -Wlto-type-mismatch. Thanks to Brian Ripley for the report.
‘src/noreturn.h’ is included before system header ‘flint/flint.h’. The latter is broken in FLINT 3.1 due to nonportable use of keyword _Noreturn and keyword macro noreturn. Thanks to Brian Ripley for the report.
‘configure’ wrongly assumed that ‘Rinternals.h’ must be located in ‘'R RHOME'/include’. Thanks to Dirk Eddelbuettel for the report (GH#3).
More pointers are zero-initialized to appease clang -Wsometimes-uninitialized.

Changes in version 0.0.1 (2025-02-17)

Description

The package is titled “Fast Library for Number Theory”, matching FLINT.
Mikael Jagan is the maintainer and sole author.
Depends: R (>= 4.3) mainly for KaTeX support when rendering Rd to HTML and ‘⁠amsmath⁠’ support when rendering Rd to PDF.
Depends: methods as flint defines S4 classes, generic functions, and methods.
Imports: stats as flint provides S3 and S4 methods for quantile.
SystemRequirements: flint (>= 3), mpfr (>= 3.1), gmp as flint links FLINT, GNU MPFR, and GNU MP. The version requirements are purely informational, as ‘configure’ and ‘configure.win’ scripts check that features used by the package are available.

Installation

A ‘configure’ script is provided for installation under Unix. The script uses pkg-config where available to determine options for linking FLINT, GNU MPFR, and GNU MP. The user can set environment variables PKG_CONFIG and PKG_CONFIG_PATH to control how pkg-config is invoked and where it searches for ‘*.pc’ files. The script gives precedence to environment variables R_FLINT_CPPFLAGS, R_FLINT_CFLAGS, R_FLINT_LDFLAGS, and R_FLINT_LIBS: if any of these is set, then the script does not use pkg-config. In that case, R_FLINT_LIBS gets a default value -lflint -lmpfr -lgmp. The other R_FLINT_* are empty by default.
A ‘configure.win’ script is provided for installation under Windows. Currently, it invokes ‘configure’, passing along positional parameters, and does nothing else.

Documentation

S4 classes, generic functions, and methods are documented under help topics with keyword classes or methods. Interfaces to special mathematical functions are documented under help topics with keyword math. One can use help(package = "flint") or (for example) help.search(package = "flint", keyword = "math") to get a list of (non-internal) help topics.

Classes

Virtual class flint with nonvirtual subclasses ulong, slong, fmpz, fmpq, mag, arf, acf, arb, and acb. Objects can be understood as vectors of length at most 2^32-1 or 2^64-1 (depending on the ABI) of the so-named C types. The implementation is based on external pointers.
ulong and slong represent vectors of fixed precision unsigned and signed integers. The integer size is 32 or 64 bits (depending on the ABI).
fmpz represents vectors of arbitrary precision signed integers.
fmpq represents vectors of arbitrary precision rational numbers, always in “canonical” form with numerator and positive, coprime denominator
mag represents vectors of fixed precision error bounds.
arf and acf represent vectors of arbitrary precision floating-point real and complex numbers.
arb and acb represent vectors of arbitrary precision floating-point real and complex numbers with error bounds. They support “ball arithmetic”.

Generic Functions

S4 generic functions Num, Num<-, Den, and Den<- for getting and setting numerators and denominators of quotients.
S4 generic functions Mid, Mid<-, Rad, and Rad<- for getting and setting midpoints and radii of balls in a metric space.
S4 generic functions Real, Real<-, Imag, and Imag<- for getting and setting real and imaginary parts of complex numbers.

Methods

S4 methods are defined for generic functions [, [<-, [[, [[<-, Complex, Den, Den<-, Imag, Imag<-, Math, Math2, Mid, Mid<-, Num, Num<-, Ops, Rad, Rad<-, Real, Real<-, Summary, all.equal, anyDuplicated, anyNA, as.raw, as.logical, as.integer, as.numeric, as.complex, as.vector, as.matrix, as.array, as.data.frame, as.Date, as.POSIXct, as.POSIXlt, coerce, cut, duplicated, findInterval, format, initialize, is.finite, is.infinite, is.na, is.na<-, is.nan, is.unsorted, length, length<-, match, mean, mtfrm, names, names<-, print, quantile, rep, rep.int, rep_len, show, seq, sequence, summary, unique, and xtfrm.
S3 methods are defined for S3-turned-S4 generic functions. These methods call the S4 generic function so that S4 dispatch occurs if the S3 generic function is called.

New Features

Generator functions for each of the nonvirtual subclasses of virtual class flint.
C library functions arb_const_pi, arb_const_log2, arb_const_log10, arb_const_e, arb_lambertw, acb_lambertw, arb_dirichlet_zeta, acb_dirichlet_zeta, arb_dirichlet_hurwitz, acb_dirichlet_hurwitz, acb_dirichlet_lerch_phi, arb_hypgeom_gamma, acb_hypgeom_gamma, arb_hypgeom_rgamma, acb_hypgeom_rgamma, arb_hypgeom_lgamma, acb_hypgeom_lgamma, acb_hypgeom_polygamma, arb_hypgeom_2f1, and acb_hypgeom_2f1 acb_polygamma, acb_dirichlet_zeta, acb_dirichlet_hurwitz, acb_dirichlet_lerch_phi, acb_hypgeom_gamma, acb_hypgeom_rgamma, acb_hypgeom_lgamma, and acb_hypgeom_2f1 are interfaced as R functions with identical names and “prototypes”. Arguments are coerced to the correct class and recycled internally.
R function flintABI returning the size in bits of C type mp_limb_t, either 32 or 64. The value is determined at configure time.
R function flintIdentical for testing whether two flint vectors have identical class, length, and “content”. This test is less strict than the test for pointer equality done by identical(x, y) when x and y are external pointers.
R function flintLength for getting the length of a flint vector as a ulong vector or, optionally, as a traditional numeric vector subject to rounding error.
R functions flintPrec and flintRnd for getting and setting the global default precision and rounding modes.
R function flintSize for calculating the number of bytes used by a flint vector.
R function flintTriple returning a character vector of length 3 of the form c(class, length, address), useful if details about a flint vector must be printed.
R function flintVersion returning a list containing header and library versions for FLINT, GNU MPFR, and GNU MP. Header versions are determined at compile time. Library versions are determined at run time.