Thanks. That makes sense. I confess to not having needed extended precision
from J yet. I'm relieved to know it's implemented that way. Automatically
switching, like you say, would be expensive.
On 12 Jan 2016 4:46 am, "Raul Miller" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Matthew Baulch <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > 2^.!21 is greater than 64 and 2^.!20 is less, so I'm guessing roll is not
> > implemented with arbitrary precision arithmetic.
>
> As Roger Hui pointed out, roll is implemented for arbitrary precision
> numbers (or: you can try that and see that it works).
>
> What it's not implemented for is floating point numbers which require
> arbitrary precision results.
>
> Hopefully that makes sense? (If you think about an array
> implementation, the switch from densely packed numbers to arbitrary
> precision numbers is comparable to the switch from numbers to boxed -
> it's not something people should want to have happen by mistake.)
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
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