Sure. An interesting, if not terribly relevant, fact is that there are more irrational numbers that we *can't* represent the above way than that we can (IIRC).
However, those aren't actually interesting in solving the kinds of problems we want to solve with a programming language, so it's academic, and symbolic representation certainly gains you some things and costs you some things in meaningful engineering kinds of ways. On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Brandon Allbery <allber...@gmail.com>wrote: > On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Bardur Arantsson > <s...@scientician.net>wrote: > >> On 2013-09-20 18:31, Brandon Allbery wrote: >> [--snip--] >> > unless you have a very clever representation that can store >> > in terms of some operation like sin(x) or ln(x).) >> >> I may just be hallucinating, but I think this is called "describable >> numbers", i.e. numbers which can described by some (finite) formula. >> >> Not sure how useful they would be in practice, though :). >> > > I was actually reaching toward a more symbolic representation, like what > Mathematica uses. > > -- > brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine > associates > allber...@gmail.com > ballb...@sinenomine.net > unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad > http://sinenomine.net > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > >
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