Back when I was a C++ newbie, I decided to write a rational number class because I thought it would be a good exercise.  I revised it and added features over the years as I learned new stuff (I/O manipulators, for example).  I looked around my computer for it this morning and found a version that I wrote over a decade ago when I still didn’t have even a C++11 compiler to work with.

About 11 or 12 years ago, WG21’s numerics study group was thinking about publishing a Technical Specification (TS, a kind of warning about possible future standardization) that would propose some new number types (fixed-point types, an unbounded integer, things like that).  I confidently raised my hand and said that I had a rational number that I could add and proposed what would eventually morph into this*.  That “Numbers TS” is no longer in the works, so my rational number died.

I think I’ll revisit that to bring it at least to the C++20 level and implement it using the bigint class that I mentioned in the last post to avoid overflow.  I also want to put the I/O manipulators back just because I think they’re Really Cool. 😎

That should keep my brain working for a little while longer.

*Starting with the “[rational.math] Rational math” section, that’s what much of the C++ standard reads like.  It’s most definitely not a tutorial. 😎