Update elliptic.nim

[planetis-m]

The most significant change is turning let into const - a huge amount of temporaries goes away. Other is porting from strutils to strformat. And using 'bi when possible

[planetis-m]

Error: undeclared identifier: 'bi'

[narimiran]

Error: undeclared identifier: 'bi'

That's why we need https://github.com/nim-lang/bigints/blob/master/src/bigints/private/literals.nim, for example. See comment there: "It is needed as a workaround for Nim's parser for versions <= 1.4."

Long story short: please revert those 'bi changes.

[dlesnoff]

So we have to drop support for versions <= 1.4 to define const litterals with Bigints ?
I appreciate the change from strutils to strformat, the echo looks nicer that way.

[konsumlamm]

So we have to drop support for versions <= 1.4 to define const litterals with Bigints ?

We have to drop support for Nim <= 1.4 when we want to use 'bi.

[konsumlamm]

The reason the CI is failing is that this doesn't work in Nim 1.4.8, I think we'll have to use a variable instead.

[dlesnoff]

I am not a fan of all those constants defined in each script. We should provide a file in the module with different constants, like zero, one, eventually the first digits up to ten, minus one, …
I don’t know if these declarations takes memory, but if it does, we should make these imports optional.

[planetis-m]

Can you guys update the CI to 1.6 instead? Here and in different projects like the main repo, threading, etc my PRs are stalled because older versions of Nim don't have features needed.

[dlesnoff]

I don’t think we will remove 1.4.8 support. It has been released on 26th May and I believe we keep support for Nim versions that has been released less than one year before (or at least two Nim versions).
Otherwise, I do not understand how this impact your personal projects : we do support 1.6.
Is it really a needed feature here ?
I think you can simply move the code between brackets into a let statement, before the echo.

[planetis-m]

No I meant various PRs I made in Nim are postponed because of build failures. Like nim-lang/Nim#19360 nim-lang/threading#6 This is pbl not a good place to discuss this.