On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 09:35:13PM +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 11:17:55AM +0000, Alex Gough wrote: > > Yes, at some point allowing 10**222222222222222222222, is just silly, > > and I doubt the potentional applications are numerous enough to > > warrant trying it. So long as we're clear about what the limits are, > > about 10**98 particles in the universe, isn't it? > How many real world calculations seriously need numbers considerably > larger than that?
Remember that many important calculations are not "real world". For instance, numbers bigger than 10**98 are used routinely in cryptography (though not bigger than 10**2147483648, which is your point, I think). I'm sure you could, in theory, get numbers that high when dealing with statistical stuff. But if people say it hardly ever happens in practice, then I'm sure they're right. -- David $_=".--- ..- ... - .- -. --- - .... . .-. .--. . .-. .-.. .... .- -.-.". " -.- . .-.\n";s!([.-]+) ?!$_=$1;y/-./10/;$_=chr(-1+ord pack"B*","01".0 x(5 -length)."1$_");y/DWYKAQMOCVLSFENU\\IGBHPJXZ[~nfb`_ow{}/a-z0-9/;$_!ge;print