# MONF Documentation

### 0.5

Date:
Oct--Nov 2009
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Andrew Lewis from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge for helpful discussions.

## Overview

The aim of this work is to provide a basic but very thin and fast implementation of monomials with only minimal overhead. The main step in order to achieve this is encoding a given monomial in one machine word, or possibly two, although this case is handled transparently. As a consequence of this design decision, this implementation can only be used for monomials in a fixed small number of variables and with small non-negative exponents.

## Detailed introduction

We assume that a number of variables is fixed from the beginning, where , and that we only consider monomials with non-negative partial degrees of at most . Using bits per exponent, we can encode the monomial as

in a 64-bit word as long as . This allows us to handle the following exponent sizes:

 1 32 4294967296 2 21 2097152 3 16 65536 4 12 4096 5 10 1024 6 9 512 7 8 256

In order to define the degree with a unique signature for all of these values of , we assume that we only deal with monomials of degree less than . Note that this only affects the case .

It turns out that, for many operations on monomials, this form is very convenient in the sense that the operation can be performed on as one word instead of involving words. Examples of this are multiplication and division, which correspond to addition and subtraction, and the inverse lexicographical order, which corresponds to the operator <. As an aside, the problem of possible overflow is burried in the our assumption that no monomial operation will involve partial exponents exceeding . Other operations, for example, checking whether one monomial is divisible by another, involve explicitly considering partial exponents using bitmasks.

## Monomial orderings

The following (global) monomial orderings are typically considered:

• Lexicographic ordering (lex).

• Inverse lexicographic ordering (invlex).

• Degree lexicographic (deglex).

• Degree reverse lexicographic (degrevlex).

In this context, it is very useful to note that, in the inverse lexicographic ordering, we have if and only . While the first test could involve word comparisons plus the overhead of a loop, the second test only involves one word comparison.

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