----- Original Message -----
From: Orlando Andico
To: The Main Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Discussion List
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2005 10:56 AM
Subject: Re: [plug] Re: ACM-ICPC 2006 World Finals to use open source
>if i may ask a potentially stupid question.
>what is the use of "long double?" arguably,
>people who need numbers that large would
>be using GMP or PARI.
actually this is a good question.... you usually use this huge precision if
you deal with huge numbers just to get the most accurate answer.... one good
example is in the field of astronomy...
well.. yeah. that was my point. If you're doing scientific calculations with very large numbers, "float" or "double" ( i.e. IEEE754 data types) are NOT ACCURATE ENOUGH. certainly for these types of calculations (or say doing prime number factorization for really large values) libraries like GMP and PARI are more "mathematically rigorous."
hence my question -- if it's not good enough for a double, then perhaps it's not good enough for a long double?
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