Re: Large numbers (or is Ada the choice for me?)

[georg@ii.uib.no (Hans Georg Schaathun)]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2001 18:28:43 -0500, Marin David Condic
  <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote:
: Well, let me check a few assumptions. 1) We can never run out of numbers.
: (Go ahead. Use all you want. We'll make more! :-) 2) We *can* and *will*
: eventually run out of memory. Hence, even if you did all the math with some
: sort of fractional representation rather than a decimal representation, it
: would be possible to construct numbers that exceed the capacity of the
: machine.

That is just as simple and likely as creating a problem it takes 50 years
to solve (with infinite memory resources).  The solution is rather simple,
the program returns error, `sorry, sam, your problem is to large'.

I am certainly aware that I won't be able to solve all the problems
I might want to create, but test runs in maple indicates that _this_
problem is solvable if memory is handled with care.

:           Hence, I think it stands to reason that you would be off on a
: fool's errand to insist on no approximations or limitations whatsoever.

I don't insist on no limitations.  I accept the limitations of memory 
and CPU resources, but I want to do as much as possible within these
limits.  My problem is primarily to determine whether the system has
integer solutions or not, which means that I can't accept (not even risk)
any rounding errors of � or more.  I doubt that floating point can save 
significant amounts of memory with this requirement.

: There has to be some sort of practical upper limit imposed by the available
: memory if nothing else.

Yes, so I won't cry over problems which can't be solved.

: As I said elsewhere, I rather hastily picked a bad example - but I think the
: point still stands that one will have to live with some sort of
: approximation on the representation - even if in practice, it may be so
: small as to not matter.

Wrong, my outset is to solve a couple of practical problems, not to 
solve any problem you might think of.

:-- Hans Georg
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