On 9/13/05 7:28 AM, "Andy Little" <andy@servocomm.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
"Daryle Walker" <darylew@hotmail.com> wrote
OK. When you say "arbitrary precision," you mean that a precision limit must be set (at run-time) before an operation. Most people use "arbitrary precision" to mean unlimited precision, not your "run-time cut-off" precision.
Are there really libraries that have unlimited precision? What happens when the result of a computation is irrational?
You can't store it conventionally, since such numbers would need an infinite amount of memory. You would just give up and have to define some sort of rounding/cut-off philosophy. As another poster said, you could store the irrational components of a number with some sort of formula (but only for algebraically irrational numbers, not transcendentally irrational numbers). -- Daryle Walker Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie darylew AT hotmail DOT com