Hi,

In message "Re: [ ruby-Bugs-1940 ] Fixnum#** slower than Bignum#**"
    on Sun, 22 May 2005 07:22:42 +0900, noreply / rubyforge.org writes:

|In exponentation, Fixnum is much slower than Bignum, which lets us assume that some kind of a problem is
|in the implementation.

|If it's a feature, maybe someone can explain.
|If it's a bug, maybe someone can fix ;)

We have been too lazy to calculate fixnum ** float case directly,
until someone complains.  Now we are going to support the case since
Wolfgang has complained. ;-)

Wait for the next release (1.8.3).

							matz.